Inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee (1955-) was born on this day in London, England; his parents were computer scientists who inspired his love for programming.

His idea for the Internet came to him in 1980. While trying to organize his notes, he devised a way to keep "track of all the random associations one comes across in real life and brains are supposed to be so good at remembering but sometimes mine wouldn't."

By the late 1980s and early 1990s, Berners-Lee looked at the Web as a collaborative medium for researchers. He created hypertext to link documents by developing HTML (HyperText Mark-up Language) as a coding system with URL (Universal Resource Locator) addresses.

The URL would direct a browser to Internet documents. With HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol), Berners-Lee created the rules by which these documents linked together on computers across the Internet.

"We live in a fractal world," he observed about the complexities of life.

On August 6, 1991, he unleased his digital wonderland to the world with the first web site, info.cern.ch. Introduced on the alt.hypertext newsgroup, Berners-Lee called the "WWW project" a way "to allow information sharing within internationally dispersed teams, and the dissemination of information by support groups."

Calling himself "quite an ordinary person," Berners-Lee was knighted in 2004 and continues to direct the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the organization that works to discover the full potential of the Web. He once said, "You affect the world by what you browse."

Pause and dream.