It may not be a start-up, and its founders most certainly didn't have a business plan, but on November 13, 1990, the World Wide Web was officially born. Despite the fact that it's not exactly a business, no other invention in recent history has so deeply shaped the direction of American entrepreneurship. Timothy John Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau, two scientists working at CERN in Switzerland, first developed a proposal for the concept this week, and a little over a month later—on December 25—they communicated between an HTTP client and a server using the Internet. In layman's terms, they turned the Internet on.

Since then the Internet has burgeoned into an entity of its own, serving as the springboard for more start-ups and businesses than we could even begin to count. The web also acted as the backdrop for one of the great historic flops in American business—the dot come bust. And it's even spawned an entire cottage industry of useless information, pictures, and videos—some good, some bad, and some so bad, they're good: