Original NeXT computer used by Sir Tim Berners-Lee to design the World Wide Web

This is the original NeXT computer used by Sir Tim Berners-Lee to design the World Wide Web and host the first web page at the European laboratory for particle physics, CERN, in December 1990. In March 1989 Tim Berners-Lee wrote a document on “Information Management: A Proposal” for colleagues at CERN. His boss, Mike Sendall, described the proposal as ‘vague but exciting…’ and, in 1990, approved the purchase of the NeXT computer. This was the ideal platform for Berners-Lee to demonstrate his vision, merging the ideas of hypertext with the power of the Internet. The machine was the first web server and to turn it off would have simply meant turning off the World Wide Web, an idea which is inconceivable to us today.