Web is 20. And, of course, Steve Jobs was there.

These days, the Internet, to most people, is about fun, real or imagined), supposed content creation and self-exposure via sites like Facebook, countless blogs and other experiments in the so called “Web 2.0”. No matter how is the content being created, it’s still the Internet. Web. Without version numbers. PC Mag’s editor Lance Ulanoff, after being apparently off-track recently, has got things right.

Today’s content may appear to be pathetic and the very vague online community may not be very serious about itself, but the beginning of the Internet was serious, meaningful and purposeful.

The wild and wonderful world of the World Wide Web was born in CERN, world largest particle physics lab in Switzerland. 20 years ago, in March 1989, Timothy John Berners-Lee drafted the “Mesh”. The proposal concerned, in Sir Timothy’s own abstract “the management of general information about accelerators at CERN. It discusses the problems of loss of information about complex evolving systems and derives a solution based on a distributed hypertext system”.

CERN was, and still is, a top scientific establishment so it’s not surprising that it used expensive and state-of-the-art computing technology, which also happened to be not just “put together” – it was designed. And expensive. Back in the late 80s and early 90s there was only one computer that would fall into all above mentioned categories. NeXT.

Internet as we know it now may be a side product of the original Mesh proposal, nevertheless, it was created on Steve Jobs’s NeXT. In 1990, the NeXT Cube became the world’s first Web server that went online. Like it or not, Steve Jobs was there when the Internet was created.