He said it was 'a primitive starting point' to creating that part of the internet we most often use and write in abbreviated form as 'WWW', or call simply the Web - a universe of network-accessible information.

The Web's outstanding feature is known as hypertext, a system of immediate cross-referencing that fundamentally changed the way the internet is used.

In recognition of his services to the global development of the internet, Buckingham Palace last week bestowed a knighthood on Mr Berners-Lee, a British citizen who lives in the United States.

As part of Queen Elizabeth's New Year's Honours list, he was made a Knight Commander. This is the second most senior rank of the Order of the British Empire, one of the Orders of Chivalry awarded each year.

In characteristic fashion, Sir Tim generously shared his award of distinction.

'This is an honour which applies to the whole Web development community, and to the inventors and developers of the internet, whose work made the Web possible,' he said in a statement. 'I accept this as an endorsement of the spirit of the Web; of building it in a decentralised way; of making best efforts to keep it open and fair; and of ensuring its fundamental technologies are available to all for broad use and innovation, and without having to pay licensing fees.'

Sir Tim, who works as a senior research scientist at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has not received any direct commercial gain from inventing the Web. He made all his code available on the internet in 1991, giving away his proprietary rights in the belief that the Web should be an open system if it was to be universally accepted.

Such an unselfish trait was noted by the late Michael Dertouzos, former director of the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, in his foreword to Sir Tim's Weaving the Web.

Mr Dertouzos wrote: 'As technologists and entrepreneurs were launching or merging companies to exploit the Web, they seemed fixated on one question: 'How can I make the Web mine?' Meanwhile, Tim was asking, 'How can I make the Web yours?''

Born in London, Sir Tim graduated from Queen's College at Oxford University, England in 1976. It was there that he built his first computer with a handful of equipment, including a soldering iron, an M6800 processor and an old television.

In 1980, while working as a consultant software engineer at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, he wrote his first program for storing information using the kind of random associations which the human brain makes. The Enquire program - which was never published - formed the conceptual basis for the future development of the Web.

While at CERN in 1989, he proposed a global hypertext project based on his earlier Enquire work. It was designed to allow people to work together by combining their knowledge in a web of hypertext documents.

He wrote the first Web server, known as 'httpd', and the first client, 'World Wide Web', in October 1990. He also wrote the first version of the document formatting language with the capability for hypertext links, known as HTML (hypertext markup language).

The World Wide Web program was first made available within CERN in December 1990. The first successful demonstration of web clients and servers working online was made that same month.

From 1991 to 1993, Sir Tim continued working on the design of the Web, co-ordinating feedback from internet users. His initial specifications for the uniform resource locator, hypertext transport protocol and HTML were refined and discussed in larger circles as the Web technology spread.

In 1994, he founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) where he serves as director. The W3C co-ordinates Web development worldwide, with teams at MIT, the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics in France, and Keio University in Japan. The group, with almost 400 member-organisations, is aimed at ensuring the Web's stability through the steady evolution and transformation of its usage.

Sir Tim, cited by Time magazine in 1999 as one of the 100 greatest minds of the 20th century, has received many academic and scientific honours. At MIT, he is holder of the 3Com Founders Chair.

Although his creation has helped revolutionise the way many people around the world work and live, Sir Tim sees it as a work that will always remain in progress.

'We don't expect the system to eventually become perfect,' he wrote in the conclusion of Weaving the Web. 'But we feel better and better about it. We find the journey more and more exciting, but we don't expect it to end.'