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.
Berners-Lee launched the World Wide Web in 1991 and gave the world easy access to information, revolutionizing the way it worked and communicated.
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.
In his 1999 memoir "Weaving the Web", Berners-Lee said he had once considered forming a start-up to exploit his invention but calculated the move was too risky. Companies such as Netscape and Microsoft filled the gap.
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.
Instead, he focused on expanding the use of the Internet as a mode of free expression and global collaboration and now heads the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a non-profit group that works to enhance the Web's functioning.