Tim Berners-Lee

Tim Berners-Lee's parents both worked on the Ferranti Mark 1, one of the first commercial computers, and he built his own computer at Oxford from an old television and a soldering iron. In 1980 he took a short contract at CERN, the particle physics laboratory near Geneva, and wrote a program called Enquire to keep track of who was working on what, linking pages of notes to each other.

He came back to CERN in 1984 and found thousands of scientists using incompatible computers who could not easily share documents. In March 1989 he wrote a proposal for a system of linked documents accessible over the internet. His manager wrote "Vague but exciting" on the cover. By the end of 1990 he had written the first web browser, the first web server and the first web page, and had invented HTML, HTTP and the URL along the way.

The decisive moment came in 1993 when CERN, at his urging, put the web's underlying code into the public domain, free for anyone to use with no royalties. Rival systems that charged fees faded away. He founded the World Wide Web Consortium in 1994 to keep the standards open and has spent the years since arguing for net neutrality, privacy and the web as a public good.

He was knighted in 2004, and at the London 2012 Olympic opening ceremony he sat at a NeXT computer like the one he first used and tweeted "This is for everyone" to the stadium.