Tim Berners-Lee: (1955- present)

Famous For: Contributions to the birth of the Internet

He is best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. He also invented the first web browser (called the WorldWideWeb at first but later changed to Nexus to avoid confusion), the hypertext markup language (HTML), and the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP).

It started in 1989 when he was worked in the European Particle Physics Laboratory at CERN. He had sent a memo labeled Information Management: A Proposal to his boss, Mike Sendall. In this memo, he suggested sharing general information about accelerators and experiments at CERN and LHC and keep track of experiments. His proposed system Mesh would combine a nascent field of technology called hypertext that allowed for human-readable documents to be linked together, with a distributed architecture that would see those documents stored on multiple servers, controlled by different people, and interconnected.

Although his boss was not impressed with this idea, later Lee got the go-ahead to experiment with a few NeXT computers. In 1990 he again started working on this project and began writing code. By 1991 the now called World Wide Web came into existence.