For young people today, life without the World Wide Web may seem unimaginable, yet the Web is little more than 15 years old, and its inventor is still among us, still in the prime of his working life, still guiding the destiny of his revolutionary creation.

As a student at Oxford, Tim Berners-Lee built his own computer with a soldering iron from spare parts and an old television set. He was working at CERN, the European nuclear laboratory in Geneva, when he first devised the prototype of a hypertext browser to thread his way through CERN's labyrinth of information systems. Although the fledgling Internet of the early '90s already allowed computer users to exchange plain text documents over telephone lines, Berners-Lee saw the possibility of giving users around the world equal access to a shared body of information, including formatted documents, graphics, photos, audio and video.