Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the software program known as the World Wide Web in 1989, is a scientist in the true sense of the word--idealistic, interested in the pure pursuit of knowledge, and uncomfortable in the media spotlight. Yet his invention, which provides an easy way to access the Internet, has made a huge impact on modern business and communications. Some experts claim that the World Wide Web has revolutionized the ability of computer users around the world to connect to each other.

Simply put, the Web provides a way to retrieve and access documents on the Internet, the bare-bones network devised by the Pentagon that links computers around the world. On the original Internet, there were no easy ways to retrieve data. But Berners-Lee developed software that contained processes for encoding documents (HTML, hypertext markup language), linking them (HTTP, hypertext transfer protocol), and addressing them (URL, universal resource...