Tim Berners-Lee First Honoree of Millennium Technology Prize.
Reuters, via MSNBC News
World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee won $1.23 million on Thursday, the largest single amount of money he has made from an invention that has made many others very rich. Berners-Lee, 48, was named the first winner of the world's largest technology award -- the Millennium Technology Prize -- by the Finnish Technology Award Foundation at a ceremony in the Finnish city of Espoo. When myriad dot-com firms went public in the late 1990s, their founders were instantly turned into millionaires at the height of the Internet investment bubble. Most people would be hard-pressed to name the retiring Internet architect, who bypassed cashing-in on his technology contributions for an academic's salary at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States.
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4744554/
See also the W3C news item: http://www.w3.org/News/2004#item64