<P> In keeping with its birth at CERN and the first page opened, early adopters of the World Wide Web were primarily university - based scientific departments or physics laboratories such as Fermilab and SLAC . By January 1993 there were fifty Web servers across the world; by October 1993 there were over five hundred . Two of the earliest webcomics started on the World Wide Web in 1993: Doctor Fun and NetBoy . </P> <P> Early websites intermingled links for both the HTTP web protocol and the then - popular Gopher protocol, which provided access to content through hypertext menus presented as a file system rather than through HTML files . Early Web users would navigate either by bookmarking popular directory pages, such as Berners - Lee's first site at http://info.cern.ch/, or by consulting updated lists such as the NCSA "What's New" page . Some sites were also indexed by WAIS, enabling users to submit full - text searches similar to the capability later provided by search engines . </P> <P> By the end of 1994, the total number of websites was still minute compared to present figures, but quite a number of notable websites were already active, many of which are the precursors or inspiring examples of today's most popular services . </P> <P> Initially, a web browser was available only for the NeXT operating system . This shortcoming was discussed in January 1992, and alleviated in April 1992 by the release of Erwise, an application developed at the Helsinki University of Technology, and in May by ViolaWWW, created by Pei - Yuan Wei, which included advanced features such as embedded graphics, scripting, and animation . ViolaWWW was originally an application for HyperCard . Both programs ran on the X Window System for Unix. . In 1992, the first tests between browsers on different platforms were concluded successfully between buildings 513 and 31 in CERN, between browsers on the NexT station and the X11 - ported Mosaic browser . </P>

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