Today in 1994, the First International WWW Conference was held at CERN, Geneva.
Tim Berners-Lee in Weaving the Web: “It was the first time the people who were developing the Web were brought together with all sorts of people who were using it in all sorts of ways. The connections were electric…. The conference marked the first time that the people who were changing the world with the Web had gotten together to set a direction about accountability and responsibility, and how we were actually going to use the new medium.”
A year later (May 26 1995), Bill Gates declared in an internal Microsoft memo that the internet (i.e., the Web) is "the most important single development to come along since the IBM PC was introduced in 1981."
The Web gave rise to an explosion of data which in turn gave rise to today’s artificial intelligence (AI), a new generation of machine learning which can find patterns in very large volumes of data. Recently, Gates wrote that when he saw a demonstration of ChatGPT in September 2022, “I knew I had just seen the most important advance in technology since the graphical user interface.”