Name: Tim Berners-Lee Age: 49 Nationality: British Claim to fame: The man who gave us the World Wide Web — for free
He takes the credit for 20th century’s greatest invention that revolutionalized and brought the world closer that anyone’s imagination. And remarkably all he does is take credit for it — no fees, no money.
Tim Berners-Lee, created the World Wide Web and decided not to commercialize or patent his contributions to the Internet technologies he developed. And since, he has fought to keep it free, open and non-proprietary.
On Tuesday last — and about time — he got some cash to go with the credit he gets. Berners-Lee became the first recipient of the Millennium Technology Prize, the world’s largest technology prize, from the Finnish Technology Award Foundation. The prize, presented by Finnish President Tarja Halonen, is valued at one million euros ($1.2 million) and is supported by the Finnish government and private contributors.
To the committee, his invention is “an outstanding innovation that directly promotes people’s quality of life, is based on humane values and encourages sustainable economic development”. It also recognized his generosity of keeping the WWW free for anyone to use. While so many entrepreneurs and scientists who have used it became rich, this low-profile genius believes: “If I had tried to demand fees... there would be no World Wide Web. There would be lots of small webs.”
While working at CERN, the European nuclear research lab near Geneva, Switzerland he wrote his own private programme for storing information including using random associations. Named ‘Enquire’, in 1989 he proposed a global hypertext project, the World Wide Web. Designed to allow people to work together by combining their knowledge in a web of hypertext documents. He wrote the first World Wide Web server, “http”, and the first client, “WorldWideWeb” a what-you-see-is-what-you-get hypertext browser/editor which ran in the NeXTStep environment. The programme “WorldWideWeb” was first made available within CERN in December 1990 and on the Internet at large in the summer of 1991. In 1994, Tim founded the World Wide Web Consortium at the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) at MIT.
Knighted in 1997, Tim is candid about his achievements: “I was just taking lots of things that already existed and added a little, little bit.” Indeed, Berners-Lee took concepts that were well known to engineers since the 1960s, but it was he who saw the value of marrying them.
He is currently working on the ‘Semantic Web’ and is believed to be potentially as revolutionary as the World Wide Web itself. It is an attempt to standardize how information is stored on the Internet and to organize automatically the jungle of data found today on the Net into a ‘web’ of concepts. By attaching meaning to data behind the scenes, computers can do a better job of searching for information. And this, again, he would be giving it to the world for free. Thanks Tim!
He takes the credit for 20th century’s greatest invention that revolutionalized and brought the world closer that anyone’s imagination. And remarkably all he does is take credit for it — no fees, no money.
