Tim Berners-Lee in 1994

Tim Berners-Lee in 1994
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In 1989, PCs were still a novelty for many folks, and at that point, how many people outside of scientific circles had every heard of something called the Internet? Things were about to start changing, though.

On March 13 of that year, a fellow named Tim Berners-Lee (seen here in 1994) working at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, made a proposal that rather drily addressed "the problems of loss of information about complex evolving systems" and proposed "a solution based on a distributed hypertext system."

What it gave birth to was the World Wide Web, and thus, eventually, Facebook, eBay, Google, iTunes, YouTube, Pets.com, blogs....

March 13, 2009 9:38 AM PDT

Photo by: CERN

| Caption by: Jonathan E. Skillings

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