Tim Berners-Lee, 41, creator of the World Wide Web, wasn't good at connections such as names and faces, and in 1980, wrote some software as a memory substitute. His method of finding things has grown into the World Wide Web which some place as important as the invention of the printing press. Such an important development has not brought him wealth and fame; some of this has gone to Marc Andreesen, co-founder of Netscape who has been on the cover of magazines. Berners-Lee drives an old Volkswagen Rabbit, not a Mercedes-Benz like Marc. His non-profit group, World Wide Web Consortium at MIT, which helps set technical standards for the Web is a modest organization.

His energy level is like Robin Williams'; he is British and an Oxford physics major. His relentless enthusiasm has guided the Web to success. He is not altogether happy on the nature of the Web, in fact gives it a B-plus as a force for good. Why isn't he rich? Answer: Tim's not after money.

His parents are part of his success. They helped design the Ferranti Mark 1, the world's first commercially computer. Growing up, he read Arthur C. Clarke's science fiction story "Dial F for Frankenstein" which contemplated crossing the threshold of enough computer power to be an autonomous thinking machine, ala Hal in 2001, also a Clarke creation. Is the World Wide Web (WWW) a thinking machine, a global brain? No and yes. Will it transform society? For the better? Stay tuned.

Burners-Lee is dedicated to making the emerging properties of WWW both benign and with a minimal degree of order. As director of the Web, he brings together its members, Microsoft, Netscape, Sun, Apple, IBM, and 155 others, and tries to obtain consensus on technical standards in the evolving software market. Can the Web stay as one and only, or will it break down so that you will need 16 browsers to find things?

The test is to keep widely respected standard HTML 3.2 which eases travel on the Web universal. Proposed also is PICS, Platform for Internet Content Selection, to let parents filter out offending Websites. None have the effect of law, and compliance is voluntary.

The right time was 1980, and the right place was CERN, a European physics laboratory on the Swiss-French border, for Berners-Lee to create his personal memory substitute for finding information at CERN. He called it "Enquire". It allowed him to fill a document with words, which would lead him to another document for answers. This idea had earlier been proposed by Vannevar Bush in 1945 and is called "hypertext", an interlocking of documents performed by a single click.

In the late 1980's, documents could be deleted including the "dangling links", the signposts or arrows that kept tracks of the links to the next document. If these dangling links could be retained even though the document was deleted, the systems could be made worldwide. Messy, but essential. Berners-Lee wrote a proposal to link CERN's resources by hypertext, whether they be text, graphic, video, anything, a "hypermedia system", and eventually a system that could go global. Berners-Lee persisted at CERN and a NeXT computer at his desk became the first Web content "server".