Tim Berners-Lee, credited with being the inventor of the World Wide Web, has been awarded the inaugural Millennium Technology
Prize, which carries an emolument of €1 million ($1.19 million), the Finnish Technology Award Foundation announced Thursday.
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, designed
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, and 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.
Berners-Lee presently serves as director of the W3C, which coordinates Web development worldwide.
In January this year, Berners-Lee, 48, a U.K. citizen who lives in the U.S., was named a Knight Commander, Order of the British
Empire by Queen Elizabeth of the U.K. 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 said.
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