Tim Berners-Lee

Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee (born 8 June 1955), also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web, the HTML markup language, the URL system, and HTTP.

He is a professorial research fellow at the University of Oxford and a professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Timothy John Berners-Lee was born in London on 8 June 1955, the son of mathematicians and computer scientists Mary Lee Woods (1924–2017) and Conway Berners-Lee (1921–2019).

His parents were both from Birmingham and worked on the Ferranti Mark 1, the first commercially-built computer.

His paternal grandmother was a Canadian woman from Winnipeg.

He has three younger siblings; his brother, Mike, is a professor of ecology and climate change management.

Berners-Lee attended Sheen Mount Primary School, then attended Emanuel School (a direct grant grammar school at the time) from 1969 to 1973.

A keen trainspotter as a child, he learnt about electronics from tinkering with a model railway.

From 1973 to 1976, he studied at The Queen's College, Oxford, where he received a first-class BA in physics.

While there, he made a computer out of an old television set he had purchased from a repair shop.

After graduation, Berners-Lee worked as an engineer at the telecommunications company Plessey in Poole, Dorset.

In 1978, he joined D. G. Nash in Ferndown, Dorset, where he helped create typesetting software for printers.

Berners-Lee worked as an independent contractor at CERN from June to December 1980.

While in Geneva, he proposed a project based on the concept of hypertext, to facilitate sharing and updating information among researchers.

To demonstrate it, he built a prototype system named ENQUIRE.

After leaving CERN in late 1980, he went to work at John Poole's Image Computer Systems, Ltd, in Bournemouth, Dorset.

He ran the company's technical side for three years.

The project he worked on was a "real-time remote procedure call" which gave him experience in computer networking.

In 1984, he returned to CERN as a fellow.

Berners-Lee proposed an information management system on 12 March 1989 and implemented the first successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and server via the Internet in mid-November.

He devised and implemented the first Web browser and Web server and helped foster the Web's subsequent explosive development.

He is the founder and director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which oversees the continued development of the Web.

He co-founded (with Rosemary Leith) the World Wide Web Foundation.

In 1989, CERN was the largest Internet node in Europe and Berners-Lee saw an opportunity to join hypertext with the Internet:

"I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the TCP and DNS ideas and—ta-da!—the World Wide Web."

"Creating the web was really an act of desperation, because the situation without it was very difficult when I was working at CERN later. Most of the technology involved in the web, like the hypertext, like the Internet, multifont text objects, had all been designed already. I just had to put them together. It was a step of generalising, going to a higher level of abstraction, thinking about all the documentation systems out there as being possibly part of a larger imaginary documentation system."

Berners-Lee wrote his proposal in March 1989 and, in 1990, redistributed it.

It then was accepted by his manager, Mike Sendall, who called his proposals "vague, but exciting".

Robert Cailliau had independently proposed a project to develop a hypertext system at CERN, and joined Berners-Lee as a partner in his efforts to get the web off the ground.

They used similar ideas to those underlying the ENQUIRE system to create the World Wide Web, for which Berners-Lee designed and built the first web browser.

His software also functioned as an editor (called WorldWideWeb, running on the NeXTSTEP operating system), and the first Web server, CERN HTTPd (short for Hypertext Transfer Protocol daemon).

Berners-Lee published the first web site, which described the project itself, on 20 December 1990; it was available to the Internet from the CERN network.

In 2004, Berners-Lee was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his pioneering work.

In April 2009, he was elected as Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences.

Berners-Lee is a senior researcher and holder of the 3Com founder's chair at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).

He is a director of the Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI) and a member of the advisory board of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence.

He was named in Time magazine's list of the 100 Most Important People of the 20th century and has received a number of other accolades for his invention.

In 2011, he was named as a member of the board of trustees of the Ford Foundation.

He is a founder and president of the Open Data Institute and is currently an advisor at social network MeWe.

He received the 2016 Turing Award "for inventing the World Wide Web, the first web browser, and the fundamental protocols and algorithms allowing the Web to scale".