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Thanks again, Tim!

April 15, 2004

Berners-Lee wins Finnish innovation award worth $1.2M - 2004-04-15 - Boston Business Journal

Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Tim Berners-Lee has won Finland's first Millennium Technology Prize, with a cash award worth $1.2 million.

The biennial prize is bestowed by the Finnish Technology Award Foundation for outstanding technological innovation that improves quality of life and sustainable economic development.

Berners-Lee was recognized for his inventions of hyper-text markup language (HTML) and hyper-text transfer protocol (HTTP), which enable web pages to be created, organized and linked easily. In 1994 he founded the World Wide Web Consortium, which continues to develop specifications for web development.

He beat out 78 candidates from 22 countries for the award.

A graduate of Oxford University in England, he holds the 3Com Founders Chair at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

Berners-Lee receives the prize June 15 in Helsinki. In 2003, Berners-Lee was named a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire for his work.

What you and I are doing at this very moment was made possible by Tim Berners-Lee. His vision, and his ability to make it real through cooperation with others, have transformed our lives. Tim, thank you for the Web! mjh

from "Weaving the Web," by Tim Berners-Lee

''When I designed HTML for the Web, I chose to avoid giving it more power than absolutely needed -- a 'principle of least power,' which I have stuck with ever since.'' (p. 182, Weaving the Web -- The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web by Its Inventor, by Tim Berners-Lee with Mark Fischetti, ISBN 0-06-251586-1)