Creating the world wide web didn't make Tim Berners-Lee instantly rich or famous. In part, that's because the Web sprang from relatively humble technologies. Berners-Lee's invention was based on an information retrieval program called Enquire (named after a Victorian book, Enquire Within upon Everything), which he wrote in 1980 as a contract programmer at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. In part, it's because Berners-Lee did the unthinkable when, more than a decade later, he finished writing the tools that defined the Web's basic structure: he gave them away, with CERN's blessing, no strings attached. While others made millions off his invention, the soft-spoken programmer went on to found the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at MIT, which he still directs, to promote global Web standards and development.

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