35 years of the Web, 40 years of Italy online and a company from Pisa still keeping the lights on
On 6 August 1991, a physicist at CERN in Geneva named Tim Berners-Lee posted a short message to a Usenet newsgroup and put the world’s first website online. It was a single page of plain text explaining what this “WorldWideWeb” thing was and how you could try it yourself. No images. No JavaScript. No cookie banner. Nobody is asking you to subscribe to a newsletter before you finish the first paragraph.
Thirty-five years later, that page has grown into just about everything: how we work, shop, learn, argue, apply for a mortgage and watch other people cook.
Italy was already there
Here’s the part we like to bring up in Pisa. Italy didn’t wait for the Web to get online – it beat it by five years.
On 30 April 1986, from the CNUCE, right here in Pisa, Italy’s first Internet connection went live: a 64 Kbps satellite link and a ping sent to Roaring Creek, Pennsylvania. It worked. Italy was on the Internet, and the signal went out from a building a short walk from where a lot of us still work today.
Sixty-four kilobits. For context, that’s roughly the size of this paragraph, per second.
From documents to infrastructure to… whatever this is
The Web’s first job was sharing documents between researchers. Then it learned to sell things. Then it became an application platform, then a social layer, then the default place where software lives. Somewhere along the way “a website” stopped being a thing you build once and became a thing you operate: certificates, deployments, caches, CDNs, monitoring, backups, patch cycles.
And now, over the last couple of years, the Web has picked up a new layer again. AI models write the first draft, summarise the page, generate the image, answer the support ticket and suggest the code. It’s the fastest shift in how people actually use the Internet since the smartphone and, quietly, it has changed the infrastructure question too. More computers, more data movement, more services to keep coordinated, more things that can go wrong at three in the morning.
Which, if you squint, is the same job as 1986. Just with more zeros 😀
Which brings us to us
COMMpla was born in Pisa, in the city where Italy’s Internet started, and we’ve spent our time doing the unglamorous half of the Web: the part that has to actually stay up.
Today that means:
- 200+ active services
- 100+ virtual machines running
- 220+ domains under management
- How much data do we store? I started counting, then the query timed out. Next article, promise 😄
- … and more
…and a team keeping all of it up & running – most of the time 😄
Anyone who has ever run production infrastructure knows that “most of the time” is the honest version. The disk fills up on a Wednesday morning. A cache table grows a hundred times overnight. An automatic update restarts a database at 14:28 without asking. The job isn’t preventing every surprise, it’s noticing quickly and fixing it before anyone has to write an email about it.
Thirty-five years after a text page at CERN, and forty years after a 64 Kbps ping from Pisa, that’s still the work: keep the signal going.
Happy birthday, Web. 🌐
COMMpla – digital services, web platforms and managed infrastructure. From Pisa, where Italy first got online.