To celebrate the 30th anniversary of WorldWideWeb, a group of people at CERN decided to try to bring it back to life.
WorldWideWeb was the first web browser written by Tim Berners-Lee. In 1989, it came to life with a proposal he wrote for CERN to improve their information management system. The first version was released over Christmas 1990. It ran on NeXT.
The modern version runs inside your web browser. It is like a browser inside a browser. One interesting challenge was to recreate the fonts used on the NeXT computer at the time. Monitors at the time did not have square pixels, the pixels are rectangles which are wider than longer. A simple copy of the bitmap fonts would look off.
It is fun to see that a piece of modern history can live on as an emulated environment available to all. You can try it out yourself. To open any url, click on “Document” on the panel on the left and select “Open from full document reference”.