Updated 12 December 2001, 11.55

The site was for the rather dull-sounding Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in California, and was set up by one of their scientists, Dr Paul Kunz.

It wasn't very pretty and had nowhere near the cool graphics, sounds and animations that websites have now.

Three lines

He came up with the idea in September 1991 after visiting the web's "inventor", British programmer Tim Berners-Lee.

Seeing this new world wide web idea, he decided it would be a great way of showing off his centre's research.

			Fact File
	Net & www facts
		500 million people are online worldwide
		www was invented in 1991 to organise info on the internet
		Internet first started emerging in a simple form in the 1960s
		Internet celebrated its 25th birthday in 1996

The website had three lines of writing and two URL links, one going to a list of e-mail addresses and the other to a database of scientific research.

Talking computers

We're used to very different sites now, but future websites are set to be even cooler, according to people who spoke at a meeting at SLAC to mark the anniversary.

Computers will talk to other computers and we'll be accessing the web through mobile phones and other hand-held gadgets.