the World Wide Web made it's debut.
It's amazing to think that prior to my senior year in high school (mullets and Zooba pants were still in and the whole Grunge rock phase hadn't made its way west from Seattle yet and MTV still played videos) the internet was actually in use! And I remember typing papers on our school library's apple IIe (yes, our library had only one computer!).
As the brief article states, Tim Berners-Lee developed it while he was at CERN (yes, the same one featured in "Angels and Demons" and the institution that brought us the giant particle collider that was supposedly going to open up black holes that would consume our planet) as a way for scientists to communicate more effectively.
This made me recall a conversation I had with a College Comp II student who was talking about how her father couldn't believe an institution (let alone the governments for several countries) would spend billions to develop a particle collider (that had to go through numerous modifications and fixes) when the money could be spent on so many other pressing needs. He just couldn't see the need to waste so much money on abstract concepts or theories that won't help us today.
He had a point.
However, that's the thing with innovation and discover: you never know where it will come from or where it will go.
Had countries, governments, and scientists never invested billions into research, we wouldn't (likely) have the web. Think how the web has totally altered every aspect of our existence: how we pay bills, how we shop, how we interact, how we research, how we think, how we learn, how we meet, how we connect . . .
Now that was not Berners-Lee's intention, but that's how innovation happens. You create something and then ten other people improve upon or expand it. Then another hundred people take those improvements and expansions and apply it to various fields and areas the previous ten people never ever thought of. And boom - you have a tool that alters our way of life.
So that's why we invest billions in research and development, despite all of the areas that could also use that money.
And I'm sure glad we do.
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