TIM BERNERS-LEE CHANGED THE WORLD FOREVER WITH HIS INVENTION

Time Magazine has described him thusly: "Unlike so many of the inventions that have moved the world, this one truly was the work of one man...the World Wide Web is Berners-Lee's alone. He designed it. He loosed it on the world.” They also refer to him as one of the 100 greatest minds of the 20th century. His creation has already changed the way people do business, entertain themselves, exchange ideas, and socialize with one another.

Tim Berners-Lee graduated from the Queen's College at Oxford University, England in 1976. While there he built his first computer with a soldering iron, TTL gates, an M6800 processor and an old television. He gained his early experience in the Uk and also the U.S. In 1989, he proposed a global hypertext project, to be known as the World Wide Web. Based on the earlier "Enquire" work, it was designed to allow people to work together by combining their knowledge in a web of hypertext documents.

It is really hard to believe that this phenomenon, called the Web and the Internet, is still less than 20 years old. We can only imagine the wonderful future that awaits us all in the incredible developments to follow.

Already the entertainment world has been set on its collective ear. But so have all forms of business and the way we conduct our lives. Teaching has been liberated in even the deepest parts of Africa and the primitive world.

TIM BERNERS-LEE, inventor of the Web, is currently the director of the World Wide Web Consortium, the coordinating body for Web development, and he occupies the 3Com Founders chair at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science. Berners-Lee has also been granted a knighthood in his home country of Britain. So Sir Tim, bravo and thank you from the rest of the world.