A
webserver for
Unix,
VMS and other platforms, written at
CERN in
1991-
1993, based on the
libwww C library.
This was the server used to power the original network of webservers operated by the European high-energy physics labs, of which CERN is the most important. World-wide access was available through telnet info.cern.ch 80, an interface to the CERN line-mode browser.
The server and browser code were publically available; some of it was used in NCSA Mosaic, the Motif-based Unix browser that created world-wide interest in the Web, and none of it was used in NCSA httpd, soon to be the most popular webserver.
In 1993-1994, Ari Luotonen was hired as a student assistent to resume CERN httpd development; he rapidly caught up with NCSA httpd, adding the essential features, without the design flaws, and making it just as easy to install. Some features, such as proxying even for non-HTTP servers, didn't appear in other servers until much later.
When Ari joined NCSA httpd author Rob McCool to create the Netscape webserver, development came to a standstill again, and although it was adopted by the W3 consortium, we haven't heard of it since.