Berners-Lee now works from a spartan office at MIT's Computer Science lab, where he draws a modest salary as head of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the body which tries to maintain technical order in the burgeoning technology of the Web. Until recently, he wasn't even a professor - though MIT has now put that right and given him an endowed Chair. No wonder that whenever he appears in public, the images that come to mind are not those from Kubrick's film 2001, but from 'The Road Not Taken', Robert Frost's poem about the choices we make in life. 

Two roads diverged in a wood.
And I - I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Berners-Lee has software in his blood. Both his parents were programmers who worked for the British company Ferranti on one of the first commercial computers. He read physics at Queen's College, Oxford, where he built his first computer with a soldering iron, a microprocessor chip and an old television set. Graduating in 1976, he worked first for Plessey and later for a firm writing typesetting software.

In many respects, he looks like an Englishman from central casting - quiet, courteous, reserved. Ask him about his family life (he has an American wife and two children) and you hit a polite but exceedingly blank wall. Ask him about the Web, however, and he is suddenly transformed into an Italian - words tumble out nineteen to the dozen and he gesticulates like mad. There's a deep, deep passion here.

And why not? It is, after all, his baby. The strange thing is that it all happened because he has a terrible memory. Names and faces often elude him, for example, "I needed something to organise myself", he says, "I needed to be able to keep track of things, and nothing out there - none of the computer programs that you could get, the spreadsheets and the databases, would really let you make this random association between absolutely anything and absolutely anything".

So in the end he wrote such a program himself, while on a six-month consultancy at CERN, the European centre for research in particle physics, in 1980. He called the program ENQUIRE (for "enquire within about everything"). Berners-Lee describes it as a "memory substitute" which enabled him to fill a document with words which, when highlighted, would lead to other documents for elaboration. When his attachment ended, Berners-Lee returned to England and helped found a start-up company doing computer graphics and related stuff. But the lure of CERN endured and he returned there in the late 1980s charged with supporting the lab's community of physicists in their retrieval and handling of information.

What struck him second time around was how, at an institutional level, the laboratory suffered from the same memory problems as himself. CERN is a vast organisation, doing research of unimaginable complexity. Most of its experiments are done by teams of visiting physicists. Maintaining coherent documentation in such circumstances -- with so many people coming and going and leaving little trace of what they'd done and why they did it -- was a nightmarish task.

Berners-Lee felt that the organisation needed some way of consolidating its organisational knowledge. So at the beginning of 1989 he sat down at a Macintosh computer and hammered out a proposal that would change the world. What was needed, he argued, was some kind of linked information system -- a prosthesis for a chaotic organisational memory. He proposed something based on 'hypertext' or 'non-sequential writing' - a method of composition in which parts of a document can be linked to parts of an entirely different document, rather as footnotes are linked to reference marks in a conventional book. He suggested building an experimental hypertext 'web' for the worldwide community of physicists who used CERN and its publications.

It took the CERN management some time to give the go-ahead, but when they did in November 1990 Berners-Lee created the software needed to make the Web a reality with astonishing speed. In December 1991 the Laboratory's computer newsletter announced the 'World Wide Web' to the community of High Energy Physics. It had taken just over a year from the moment Berners-Lee had typed the first line of code.

As a concept, hypertext was old hat, dating back to the 1940s. Berners-Lee's great ideas were to make it global and make it useable by ordinary people. It's important to remember that even in 1989, the Internet was a vast information resource with thousands of archives and millions of documents secreted on servers all over the world. In order to make use of these facilities, however, you needed to know what you were doing. Accessing the Net before Berners-Lee was akin to using the MS-DOS or UNIX operating systems -- you could do almost anything provided you knew the lingo.

The trouble was that the lingo was user-hostile. Computer freaks took to it like ducks to water; the rest of humanity, however, looked the other way. One of the central tasks Berners-Lee faced in creating the Web was the lowering of this threshold. He achieved it partly by inventing an [italics] interface [unitalics] -- a program called a 'browser' which stood between the user and the vast and disparate information resources of the Net. It was, in effect, a virtual window which displayed Cyberspace in an intuitive way. To this notion of a browser he added several other key ingredients: a 'server' program which would enable computers to dish out Web pages on demand, a standard method of formatting these pages and a protocol governing the exchange of documents across the Internet. Looking back, it is not so much the elegance of Berners-Lee's creation which makes one gasp, but its blinding comprehensiveness. In just over a year he took the Web all the way - from the original conception, through the hacking out of primitive browsers and servers, to the creation and elaboration of the protocols needed to make the whole thing work. And on the seventh day he rested.