STEPHAN SAVOIA/AP Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the Internet's World Wide Web, poses in his MIT office Oct. 2, 1995

Monday, March 29, 1999
Want to see how much the world has changed in the past decade? Log on to the Internet, launch a search engine and type in the word enquire (British spelling, please). You'll get about 30,000 hits. It turns out you can "enquire" about nearly anything online these days, from used Harley Davidsons for sale in Sydney, Australia ("Enquire about touring bikes. Click here!"), to computer-training-by-e-mail courses in India ("Where excellence is not an act but a habit"). Click once to go to a site in Nairobi and enquire about booking shuttle reservations there. Click again, and zip off to Singapore, to a company that specializes in "pet moving." Enquire about buying industrial-age nuts and bolts from "the Bolt Boys" in South Africa, or teddy bears in upstate New York. Exotic cigar labels! Tantric sex guides! Four-poster beds for dogs!

	Leo Baekeland Tim Berners-Lee Rachel Carson Francis Crick & James Watson Albert Einstein Philo Farnsworth Enrico Fermi Alexander Fleming Sigmund Freud Robert Goddard Kurt Gödel Edwin Hubble John Maynard Keynes Louis, Mary & Richard Leakey Jean Piaget Jonas Salk William Shockley Alan Turing Ludwig Wittgenstein Wilbur & Orville Wright Categories Leaders/Revol. Builders/Titans Scientiests/Thinkers Heroes/Icons

So what, you say? Everybody knows that with a mouse, a modem and access to the Internet, these days you can point-and-click anywhere on the planet, unencumbered by time or space or long-distance phone tariffs.

Ah, but scroll down the list far enough, hundreds of entries deep, and you'll find this hidden Rosebud of cyberspace: "Enquire Within Upon Everything" — a nifty little computer program written nearly 20 years ago by a lowly software consultant named Tim Berners-Lee. Who knew then that from this modest hack would flow the civilization-altering, millionaire-spawning, information suckhole known as the World Wide Web?

Unlike so many of the inventions that have moved the world, this one truly was the work of one man. Thomas Edison got credit for the light bulb, but he had dozens of people in his lab working on it. William Shockley may have fathered the transistor, but two of his research scientists actually built it. And if there ever was a thing that was made by committee, the Internet — with its protocols and packet switching — is it. But the World Wide Web is Berners-Lee's alone. He designed it. He loosed it on the world. And he more than anyone else has fought to keep it open, nonproprietary and free.

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