Hi Lew,

Not everything that happened on this date was bad.  Elizabeth Nix tells us:

The beginning of the Web as a publicly available service on the Internet arrived on August 6, 1991, when [Tim] Berners-Lee published the first-ever website. Fittingly, the site was about the World Wide Web project, describing the Web and how to use it. Hosted at CERN on Berners-Lee’s NeXT computer [“the most successful failure ever”], the site’s URL was http://info.cern.ch.

Berners-Lee didn’t try to cash in on his invention and rejected CERN’s call to patent his Web technology. He wanted the Web to be open and free so it could expand and evolve as rapidly as possible. As he later said, “Had the technology been proprietary, and in my total control, it would probably not have taken off. You can’t propose that something be a universal space and at the same time keep control of it.”

Also, see this.