7 The 100 Most Influential Inventors of All Time 7

telephone directory—a mundane beginning for one of the
technological wonders of the computer age.
From 1991 to 1993 Berners-Lee evangelized the Web.
In 1994 in the United States he established the World
Wide Web (W3) Consortium at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology’s Laboratory for Computer
Science. The consortium, in consultation with others,
lends oversight to the Web and the development of
standards. In 1999 Berners-Lee became the first holder
of the 3Com Founders chair at the Laboratory for Com-
puter Science. His numerous other honours include the
National Academy of Engineering’s prestigious Charles
Stark Draper Prize (2007). Berners-Lee is the author, along
with Mark Fischetti, of Weaving the Web: The Original
Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web (2000).

Bill Gates

(b. Oct. 28, 1955, Seattle, Wash., U.S.)

A

merican computer programmer and entrepreneur
William Henry Gates III cofounded Microsoft
Corporation, the world’s largest personal-computer software
company.
Gates wrote his first software program at the age of 13.
In high school he helped form a group of programmers
who computerized their school’s payroll system and
founded Traf-O-Data, a company that sold traffic-counting
systems to local governments. In 1975 Gates, then a soph-
omore at Harvard University, joined his hometown friend
Paul G. Allen to develop software for the first micro-
computers. They began by adapting BASIC, a popular
programming language used on large computers, for use
on microcomputers. With the success of this project,
Gates left Harvard during his junior year and, with