Web Inventor Recognized

Tim Berners-Lee, credited with inventing the World Wide Web that has brought big business and budgets to many, has finally earned a financial reward of his own: He was recently awarded the inaugural Millennium Technology Prize.

The Finnish Technology Award Foundation announced the recognition last week, which carries an honorarium of approximately $1.19 million.

Crafting the Web

The foundation describes the award as an international acknowledgement of outstanding technological innovation that directly promotes people's quality of life, is based on humane values, and encourages sustainable economic development.

While working at the European particle physics laboratory CERN in 1989, Berners-Lee proposed a global hypertext project. He envisioned the design to allow people to work together through organizing, linking, and browsing pages of content. That hypertext project became known as the World Wide Web.

The program, WorldWideWeb, was first made available within CERN in December 1990. All of Berners-Lee's code was made available on the Internet in the summer of 1991, according to information from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which Berners-Lee founded in 1994.

Other Recognition

Berners-Lee presently serves as director of the W3C, which coordinates Web development worldwide.

In January, Berners-Lee, 48, a U.K. citizen who lives in the United States, was named a Knight Commander, Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth. The title was awarded in recognition of his "services to the global development of the Internet" through the invention of the World Wide Web.

The Millennium Technology Prize will be awarded every two years, the Foundation says.