Today marks the 20th anniversary of the World Wide Web, which was founded by British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee.

Internet Founder Tim Berners-Lee

This world-changing technology started as a proposal by young Berners-Lee entitled “Information Management: a proposal,” which the supervisors he handed it to described as “vague, but exciting.”

They gave the go ahead and his team went about creating the global hypertext language (the “http” on web addresses and the links between pages) and came up with the first web browser.

And while those basics have not changed much in the past two decades, the web went from a mere 26 web server initially for nuclear physicists in Europe to serving 10 to the power 11 pages to over 1.5 billion users today.