He developed the modern internet in 1990, but it took him fourteen years to start making money off of it. He is currently developing a new internet
Sometimes, at least not immediately, the greatest inventions made by humans do not come with a million dollars. The father of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, experienced precisely this; he did not see a dime of his incredible creation until 14 years after it was made public. We are dealing with a reality that may seem unreal.
It all started in 1989 when this British engineer, who was employed at CERN (yes, the renowned European physics laboratory), had a simple yet revolutionary idea: using hyperlinks to connect documents and information. As a result, the modern web was born. He worked on multiple prototypes before releasing the first browser in December 1990, which he named the "WorldWideWeb"—as you may recall—as well as the protocols that are still in use today, HTTP and HTML.
It is funny, though, because he did not sell it, patent it, or determine its price. Not a thing. Berners-Lee claims that if he had received compensation for his creation, the web would never have spread around the world and we would now be discussing "many small sites" rather than a single, massive, shared network. This act of technological benevolence prevented him from making money off of it, at least temporarily. He did not get his first significant financial honor until 2004, at the age of 49, when he was given the $1.2 million Millennium Technology Prize. However, the man repeatedly claimed during the ceremony that his credit was just "adding a little twist to things that already existed."
In addition to leading MIt is World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Berners-Lee is currently developing the Semantic Web, a method of organizing data so that computers can better comprehend our search queries. Does that sound like science fiction? conceivable. But who would question it, considering what this man is capable of? As previously stated, it took 14 years to get paid to create the internet. We do not know what patience is if it is not that.