In March 1989, an obscure 33-year-old science fellow at the Centre Europee de Recherche Nucleaire (CERN) decided to mix ideas from hypertexting with the Internet's transmission control protocol to see what would happen.

Initially, he hoped that he could create an interlinked collection of documents that would enable researchers to quickly view each other's work in progress. He had no inkling that he had come up with the concept that would become the World Wide Web.

While Tim Berners-Lee did not get permission from his superiors at CERN to put his proposal for the "information management" scheme into practice for another year or so, he still counts that initial plan as the birth of the Web.

To commemorate the twentieth anniversary of that proposal, CERN (now known as the European Organization for Nuclear Research) invited Berners-Lee back to its headquarters near Geneva last Friday to speak about how the Web has grown into a global phenomenon and what he thinks it will grow into in the future.

CERN has posted a special section to its own Web site, called World Wide Web @ 20 naturally, to offer the public a glimpse at the proceedings. For example, this link helps explain how the Web got started and depicts the NeXT computer Berners-Lee used to create the first Web server to offer pages of simple HTML text for others to access. And by clicking on this link, you can watch a compilation of videos on the origins of the Web.

Twenty years later, there are millions of Web servers offering tens of millions of sites using the software tools Berners-Lee helped develop.

It's a stunning story that began simply as the imaginings of an obscure science fellow -- 20 years ago.