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Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, says he was in “the right place at the right time.”C.J. GUNTHER/The New York Times

Twenty-five years ago on Tuesday, Tim Berners-Lee, a Briton working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, opened public access to the World Wide Web for the first time.

Aug. 23 is now called Internaut Day, a name that combines "Internet" and "astronaut," as early technical Internet users were called.

That small first step, outlined by Mr. Berners-Lee in a paper called "Information Management: A Proposal," allowed non-technical computer experts to use the Internet in a simple way, starting with a single website in 1991 (archived at http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html). Twenty-five years later, there are now more than 1.07 billion websites.

"I happened to be in the right place at the right time, and I happened to have the right combination of background," Mr. Berners-Lee told Time magazine in 2014.

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