Tim Berners-Lee's NeXTcube computer at CERN connected to itself. That's it. The first webpage — a modest explanation of what hypertext was — loaded from the same machine that requested it. No fanfare, no announcement, just a British physicist testing whether his three inventions (HTML, URL, HTTP) could actually talk to each other. They could. Within two years, CERN released the code to the public domain for free. That decision — giving it away rather than patenting it — created a $16 trillion industry that nobody owned. The NeXTcube still exists, gathering dust in a display case, with a hand-scrawled label Berners-Lee taped to it in 1990: "This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!"
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Born on December 25, 1990
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Sir Isaac Newton
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"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants."
— Sir Isaac Newton