DOH! missed it by one day

It happened yesterday, 21 years ago. From Wired Magazine:

Aug. 7, 1991: Ladies and Gentlemen, the World Wide Web
1991: The World Wide Web becomes publicly available on the internet for the first time.

The web has changed a lot since Tim Berners-Lee posted, on this day, the first webpages summarizing his World Wide Web project, a method of storing knowledge using hypertext documents. In the months leading up to his post, Berners-Lee had developed everything necessary to make the web a reality, including the first browser and server.

His historic post appeared on the alt.hypertext newsgroup, ending a journey that began back in 1980, when Berners-Lee was at CERN, an international particle physics lab located near Geneva, Switzerland. There, working with collaborator Robert Cailliau, Berners-Lee began the Enquire project, the forerunner to what would become the web.

The project, which made hypertext a chief communications component for the first time, was intended to facilitate the sharing of information among researchers across the broader internet.

Today�s web is far more powerful and sophisticated than the research tool developed by Berners-Lee and Cailliau but continues operating on basically the same principles they established a quarter of a century ago.

In 1991, I was still living in Seattle, I had opened my first computer store (Mycroft Systems -- I was the first person to sell IBM clones on University Avenue. The name was a play on Sherlock Holmes' smarter brother and a certain software company a few miles to the East of me.) and was spending waaay to much time here: Cafe Allegro. A guy from the UW Physics department came in and dropped a stack of printout on my table and said; this looks interesting, what do you think? Needless to say, I was transfixed. It was Tim's initial paper on Hypertext Markup Language. It has been a fun ride and it ain't over yet -- seriously looking forward to the next thirty!!!