Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, is the first winner of the Millennium Technology Prize. The prize, which is to be awarded every two years by a Finnish public-private partnership, honors “an outstanding technological innovation that directly promotes people’s quality of life, is based on humane values, and encourages sustainable economic development.” It comes with ¢1 million ($1.2 million) and will be bestowed this month in Helsinki at a conference entitled “Future Society—Future Technology.”
Berners-Lee conceived of the Web as a tool to aid collaboration among CERN scientists. It was made openly available on the Internet in the summer of 1991. After leaving CERN in 1994, Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium, an international group headquartered at MIT that coordinates Web development.
