On September 29th, 1954, Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (European Council for Nuclear Research), commonly known as CERN, came into existence.
It's had some high-profile achievements. In 1978, they circulated antiprotons for 85 hours in the Initial Cooling Experiment. In 1983, the Super Proton Synchrotron discovered the particle carriers of the weak force, the W and Z bosons. They even tried to take credit for the top quark in 1984, but that was incorrect and it would be 11 years until the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory would actually discover it.
But their most successful achievement wasn't in a spec and had nothing to do with physics: While working as a computer programmer at CERN, Tim Berners-Lee’s outlined plans for “the mesh” - what became known as the World Wide Web.
CERN at 60: The Biggest Moments at the Famous Particle Physics Lab - Scientific American
