Internet has completely revolutionised information transfer processes, and has ushered in unrestricted, worldwide information flow. The momentous research and development programme behind it has been led by a range of researchers and research teams who have applied their great vision of the future to turn what years ago was Utopia into a tangible reality by designing and setting up the protocols, the technology needed for link-up, and the access services to bring all this about. The work of Lawrence Roberts, Robert Kahn, Vinton Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee is in this sense a major step forward for the benefit of mankind.

Tim Berners-Lee was born in 1955 in the U.K. and graduated in Physics in 1976 from Queen´s College, Oxford. Whilst working as a research fellow at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory, in Geneva, he conceived the idea of a global hypertext project, which years later was to become the World Wide Web. He created a prototype in 1990, and in 1991 the Web began to exert far-reaching changes on the Internet environment of the time, to the point where the world's population can now access it. Berners-Lee moved to the United States in 1994 and set up W3C, which he manages at present. This organisation is linked to the M.I.T., and works not only as a Web information storage point but also as a safeguard, defending the open Web in the face of private concerns wishing to bring in software that is subject to ownership rights.