Twenty years ago, what were you up to? Here's a reminder: Milli Vanilli was putting out its infamous album. The first Batman movie hit the big screen. Pat Sajak thought it would be a great idea to take a stab at a late night talk show. And Ringo Starr was forming his own band.

And you didn't hear about any of this stuff on the World Wide Web, because 20 years ago today it was busy being invented by Tim Berners-Lee.

The web's invention was, like many things, one of necessity. Toiling away in a European physics lab, Berners-Lee struck upon the idea of using hypertext -- those still-familiar underlined links, which, when clicked, take you off to another page of content related to that link -- in the lab environment. His idea had an intensely practical bent: Most scientists at the lab stuck around for only two years, and once they left, they pretty much took their knowledge with them as their research faded into obscurity. Berners-Lee's hyperlinks would allow researchers to cite one another as they built their projects, creating a web of information that remained linked together permanently and grew over time.

The idea took a few years to catch on (as Berners-Lee still had to write the software to make this happen), but by 1991 the first web site went live. The rest is history.

The San Jose Mercury News -- based in the region that has benefited the most from Berners-Lee's advances -- has interviews and commentary about the historic anniversary, setting the historic context for how the WWW quickly came to dominate the computing world. Of course, it hasn't been without its share of problems, too: The web was never designed with security in mind, a fact which has led it to be exploited by hackers and malware creators pretty much continuously since it was opened up to the public in the early '90s.

"We trusted everybody, made it very easy to get access to the network and made it anonymous," says one tech pioneer. "The way we set it up was almost a perfect formula for the dark side."

And despite this huge obstacle, the Web has persevered -- and even thrived. Happy birthday to the big W!