Today is the birthday of the World Wide Web (as we know it).
On April 30, 1993, CERN released their World Wide Web software, including a text client, a simple server, and a library of common code, into the public domain. The original proposal was published two and a half years earlier, on November 12, 1990, but once the protocols and source code for a working system were freely available for use, the foundations of the WWW were in place.
This action, along with the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991, initiated by (then) Senator Al Gore, led directly to the development of Mosaic, the graphical web browser that ignited the web, later in 1993. It is astounding how far this technology has come in just a decade and a half, particularly having made the leap from an obscure network tool into a primary source of information for the masses.