World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee of Britain was awarded the first Millennium Technology Prize worth euro one million or $1.23 million on Thursday.
The web was first made available to the public in 1991 thus facilitating access to information, revolutionising the way it worked and communicated.
Berners-Lee, 48, is currently the director of the World Wide Web Consortium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston.
Berners-Lee invented the Web while working at CERN, world's largest particle physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. He also created the first server, browser, and protocols central to the operation of the Web: the URL address, HTTP transmission protocol and HTML code.
Berners-Lee has a background in system design in real-time communications and text-processing software development.