<p>It all began 20 years ago today with a frustrated 29-year-old programmer who had a passion for order.</p>
<p>Tim Berners-Lee, now famous as the founder of the World Wide Web, was working as an obscure consultant at Cern, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, in the suburbs of Geneva. Berners-Lee loved the laboratory. It was full of stimulating projects and creative people, but his work, and the work of his colleagues, was stymied by the lack of institutional knowledge.</p>