[marbu]

This is likely url of XFIND gateway[1,2] which was basically a first web service making information from XFIND information system available via web. It was already in operational/demo-able state along with WorldWideWeb browser/editor (NeXT), Line mode browser (dumb command line client) in early stage of the web in the end of 1990. This is because gateways like these were crucial for the web to take of in the particle physics scientific community in the first years of the project.

This may seem obvious and boring now, but back then, it made a real difference (copy pasting a section from my old post [3]):

... a physicist from German particle physics lab DESY who get used to look up information via XFIND at CERN, but using it from DESY was bit clumsy. First of all he had to telnet to CERN, then login to IBM CERNVM machine, then start XFIND there and then finally place his query to XFIND. Moreover as the connection was slow an unstable, one have to repeat this procedure again in case of a network failure. Compared to this using Line Mode Browser from DESY to directly access XFIND Gateway at CERN was a big improvement, which helped the web to spread to DESY.

[1] https://www.w3.org/Talks/FINDGateway.html [2] example http://www.dnp.fmph.uniba.sk/cernlib/asdoc/fatmen_html3/node... [3] https://blog.marbu.eu/posts/2023-04-29-the-first-web-browser...