Industry Hall Of Fame Introduction

Paul Allen Programming Pioneer

Tim Berners-Lee Developer Of The World Wide Web

Dan Bricklin Creator Of The Electronic Spreadsheet

Vint Cerf The Father Of The Internet

Ross Cooley Compaq's Channel Champion

Larry Ellison Database Dynamo

Bronson Ingram King Of Global Distribution Empire

Charles Wang Software Mangement Mogul

John Warnock Wizard Of Type

Steve Wozniak Apple's Engineering Genius

Development Teams Introduction

The Compaq Portable

The Intel 386SX

Lotus 1-2-3

Microsoft Windows

He shuns the limelight, preferring to work quietly in academia. Yet his contribution changed nearly every business in the world and freed the Internet from being strictly the province of gearheads. In fact, many companies now owe their very existence to Berners-Lee's creation.

"I wouldn't be surprised if history records Tim Berners-Lee as the second Gutenberg . . . Gutenberg 2.0," said Jeffrey Bezos, founder and chief executive of Amazon.com, Seattle, which recorded approximately $148 million in online book and music sales last year.

Those who know Berners-Lee say it rankles him when occasional credit for developing the World Wide Web goes to Marc Andreessen of Netscape Communications Corp. and others who exploited the Web using Mosaic browser technology invented at the University of Illinois in the early 1990s.

Berners-Lee, a London native, graduated with a degree in physics in 1976 from the Queen's College at Oxford University, England. His first job after college was in engineering at Plessey Telecommunications Ltd., a U.K.-based maker of telecommunications equipment.

In the late 1970s, Berners-Lee wrote software programs for D.G. Nash Ltd. He joined CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory, in 1980. At CERN he wrote a program for his personal use, named Enquire, that would later be the conceptual start of the World Wide Web. Enquire was a name from a book written in 1858 that inspired Berners-Lee: "Inquire Within: Anything You Want To Know."

The program was put on the Internet the following summer. Berners-Lee continued his work on the Web and created early specifications of universal resource locators, HTTP and HTML.

He joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lab for Computer Science in 1994 and formed the World Wide Web Consortium, where he continues to serve as its director.

Many of Berners-Lee's former co-workers, colleagues and admirers consider him to be perhaps the greatest of all the Internet pioneers because of his vision and his continued altruistic involvement with the Web.

There is a long and growing list of people who have profited from the Web, but Berners-Lee's name is not among them. Berners-Lee is still a research scientist and, even though he is working on his first book, which is due out next year, he has made every effort to avoid becoming a religious figure in a world loaded with technology icons.

"He is clearly a wizard and it's to his credit that he did something but never tried to exploit it for his own gain," said William Schrader, chief executive of PSINet Inc., a Herndon, Va., ISP and the founder of NYSERNet, the first regional network in New York State, which provides services to universities, governments and corporations.

Tony Rutkowski, principal at Next Generation Internet Associates, a Herndon-based consulting firm, and former president of the Internet Society, said he has known Berners-Lee from their days in Geneva when Berners-Lee was at CERN and Rutkowski was at the International Telecommunications Union. Berners-Lee and his wife enjoyed acting in a local theater group, called The Little Theater of Geneva, which was run by Rutkowski's wife, Rutkowski said.

For Berners-Lee, the arts go hand-in-hand with his role as the Web's inventor, Rutkowski said. "The Web is more than just a technology," he said. "It's an interface of real human beings who share aggregate knowledge. That's different from those who grok the pipes, who could care less about what this stuff is used for or its consequence to real human beings."

Berners-Lee's knack for lateral thinking was recalled by more old friends at CERN. Brian Carpenter, now an IBM Corp. engineer in Hursley, England, ran the systems software team for computer controls of CERN Proton Synchrotron in 1980 where he met Berners-Lee, an application programmer. Carpenter remembered the invention of Enquire, which he described as a project that Berners-Lee worked on in his spare time.

"It wasn't the Web since it all ran within one computer, but it was the germ of the idea," Carpenter said in an E-mail.

For some, one of Berners-Lee's more memorable spare time projects happened when his boss refused to buy terminals in the temporary "huts" where Berners-Lee and other contract programmers sat. Berners-Lee had made a dummy terminal out of cardboard, and it had a plastic sleeve in place of the screen where he could slide in sheets of paper to "display" screen images, Carpenter said.

"Whenever someone showed up in his office, Tim would be typing on his cardboard terminal," Carpenter said. "Sadly, even this wasn't enough to get his boss to pay for real terminals. But it certainly had shades of 'Dilbert,' even back in 1980."

These days, the man gets more respect. Berners-Lee has earned many honors, including a Duddell Medal of the Institute of Physics in 1997, an honorary degree from the Parsons School of Design, New York, and Southampton University, both in 1996, and a IEEE Computer Society Wallace McDowell Award.

And then there is one award that probably warms his inner artist. At an international World Wide Web conference in Paris two years ago, Berners-Lee and CERN donated the original machines used to develop the Web to the Louvre Museum.

Now far away from his days as an amateur actor, Berners-Lee avoids the public eye and shuns interviews. At an electronic-commerce conference in Boston last August, he delivered a keynote that provided some insight as to where he believes the Internet and the Web are headed.

Berners-Lee's view of what the Web should be is twofold--a place for fluid communication, and a tool for machines to analyze data to remove the monkey work out of information processing so humans can focus on being creative.

Regarding the involvement of government in the development of the Web and E-commerce, he said, "My feeling is that when you have something common to everyone, it has to be run by the people for the people in a democratic way."

Berners-Lee said he doubts the American government will censor anything on the Web, and that the Web will remain an open and free-flowing form of communication. Just as he hopes. Just as he planned.