He altered civilization forever; Sir Tim Berners-Lee is the inventor of the World Wide Web, the Internet-based hypermedia initiative for sharing information worldwide. Until the World Wide Web was created, few had really imagined the Internet to grow as fast as it has.

Such massive technological crux emerged out of a mere need to organize computer documents better. Working for Switzerland’s CERN—the European Laboratory for Particle Physics—in 1980, Tim Berners-Lee started developing a system where mere words can link his computer files with each other.

Then he extended the connection to computers other than his own, creating a flow of information unhampered by a central database. Berners-Lee called this World Wide Web prototype “Enquire Within Upon Everything,” after a 19th Century encyclopedia.

Tim Berners-Lee singlehandedly crafted the set of rules by which those files can be linked together: HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol). He also wove Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML), the World Wide Web’s standard coding scheme, and the Universal Resource Locator (URL), its address system.

Tim Berners-Lee introduced the World Wide Web in 1989, in a paper titled Information Management: A Proposal. In August 1991, Berners-Lee released his invention with the world’s first website, http://info.cern.ch. With Marc Andreessen, he crafted the web’s first-ever browser. His partner went on to found Netscape, reaping billions.

Timothy Berners-Lee was born on June 8, 1955 in London to parents who worked on Ferranti Mark I, the first commercially sold computer. He matured to become a physicist, a graduate of England’s prestigious Oxford University. Early in his career, he served as software engineer and IT consultant for English companies, among them Image Computer Systems and Plessey Telecommunications.

Even with his contribution to humankind, Tim remains among the most underrated scientists in the world. Perhaps seeing his invention as a labor of love, Berners-Lee chose to teach at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1994. He was knighted ten years later, nonetheless.

Timothy Berners-Lee currently serves as senior research scientist for MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, whence he directs the World Wide Web Consortium. To pursue the goal of “Web interoperability,” he founded the W3 Consortium in 1994 to publish non-proprietary standards for Web languages and protocols, ensuring Web consolidation.