Tim Berners-Lee
Inventor of the World Wide Web
Born 1955
Photo: Web Summit · CC BY 2.0
«The Web as I envisaged it, we have not seen it yet. The future is still so much bigger than the past.»
Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web at CERN in 1989–90, writing the first browser and server and the HTML, HTTP and URL standards, then gave the technology away for free. Knighted in 2004 and awarded the Turing Award in 2016, he has campaigned ever since for an open Web and for users' control of their own data.
Key achievements
- Invented the World Wide Web at CERN, 1989
- Turing Award, 2016
Universities
Oxford, England
The Queen's College, first-class degree in physics, 1976; built his own computer from an old television set.
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Founded the World Wide Web Consortium at MIT in 1994 and has been a professor of computer science there since.
Facts
- As an Oxford physics student he built a working computer with a soldering iron, logic chips, a Motorola 6800 processor and an old television set bought from a repair shop.
- His March 1989 proposal for an information management system at CERN came back from his boss with the comment Vague but exciting.
- In 1993 CERN placed the Web technology in the public domain; the following year he moved to MIT to found the W3C, which sets the Web's standards to this day.
- At the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics he sat at a NeXT computer in the middle of the stadium and tweeted This is for everyone.
- He built his Oxford computer around an old television set bought from a repair shop and a spare microprocessor.
- His manager's note on the original 1989 proposal read vague but exciting, and the project went ahead anyway.
- He appeared at the 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony typing the message this is for everyone.
Photographs
Photographs come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences; the author and licence are shown on each image.