• June 14, 2004

Tim Berners-Lee, the man who conceived the World Wide Web, was finally rewarded for his breakthrough achievement on Monday by the Finnish government and other private contributors. Had he decided to patent the idea in 1989, then the Internet would be a vastly different place than it has become.

The prize, called the Millenium Technology Prize, was awarded to Berners- Lee, a British scientist who was working in a Geneva laboratory at the time, by the Finnish Technology Award Foundation. The prize was valued at 1 million euros, or 1.2 million U.S. dollars.

While many contributed to the advent of the Internet, Berners-Lee is responsible for the "world wide web," "browsers," "hypertext markup language" (HTML), and "uniform resource locator" (URL).