THE ORIGINAL PROPOSAL for the World Wide Web, written by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, is an important piece of internet history. It also can’t be opened on modern computers.
John Graham-Cumming, a British software engineer and writer, attempted to open the Word document containing the proposal. Modern versions of Microsoft Word and Apple’s Pages both utterly failed to open the file, as he outlined in a blog post. The open-source word processor LibreOffice worked, albeit with messy formatting. Graham-Cumming ultimately found a PDF exported by CERN in 1998, which was the only way he was able to see the document as it existed in 1989.