Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee (born June 8, 1955), known as TimBL, is a British computer scientist who invented the World Wide Web in 1989. His creation transformed the Internet from a tool for specialists into a global platform that billions of people use daily for communication, commerce, education, and entertainment.
Early Life and Education
Berners-Lee was born in London to parents who were both mathematicians. His mother, Mary Lee Woods, and father, Conway Berners-Lee, had worked together on the Ferranti Mark 1—one of the first commercial computers[1]. Growing up in such a household, young Tim developed an early fascination with electronics and computing.
He attended The Queen’s College, Oxford, where he studied physics, graduating with first-class honours in 1976. During his time at Oxford, he built his first computer using a soldering iron, TTL gates, an M6800 processor, and an old television set.
Path to the Web
After graduation, Berners-Lee worked at several companies before a pivotal six-month stint as a software consultant at CERN in 1980. There, he wrote a program called ENQUIRE for his own use—a notebook program that stored information with links between entries. This early experiment with hypertext planted the seeds of what would become the Web[2].
He returned to CERN as a fellow in 1984. The laboratory housed thousands of scientists from around the world, each using different computers with incompatible systems. Information was scattered across countless machines, and finding anything required knowing exactly where to look.
Inventing the Web
On March 12, 1989, Berners-Lee submitted a proposal titled “Information Management: A Proposal” to address CERN’s information-sharing challenges. His supervisor, Mike Sendall, wrote on it: “Vague, but exciting.”
By December 1990, working with colleague Robert Cailliau, Berners-Lee had built all the components of a working Web[3]:
- HTML (HyperText Markup Language) for creating documents
- HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) for transmitting them
- URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) for addressing them
- The first web browser (called WorldWideWeb), running on a NeXT computer
- The first web server
On December 20, 1990, the first website went live at info.cern.ch.
Making the Web Free
Perhaps Berners-Lee’s most consequential decision was advocating for the Web to be free. In April 1993, CERN released the Web’s underlying technology into the public domain, royalty-free, forever.
This decision—which Berners-Lee actively championed—ensured that anyone could create websites, build browsers, or innovate on the platform without asking permission or paying fees. The open Web sparked a global explosion of creativity and commerce.
W3C and Continued Leadership
In 1994, Berners-Lee moved to MIT, where he founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to develop web standards and ensure the Web’s long-term growth[4]. He continues to direct W3C and holds professorships at both MIT and Oxford.
In 2009, he established the World Wide Web Foundation to advance the open Web as a public good. More recently, he co-founded Inrupt, a company developing the Solid platform to give individuals control over their personal data.
Honors and Recognition
Berners-Lee has received numerous honors:
- Knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2004 “for services to the global development of the Internet”
- Awarded the Order of Merit in 2007 (one of only 24 living members)
- Received the 2016 ACM Turing Award “for inventing the World Wide Web, the first web browser, and the fundamental protocols and algorithms allowing the Web to scale”
- Featured in the 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony, where he tweeted “This is for everyone” from a vintage NeXT computer
Legacy
The Web’s impact on human civilization is almost impossible to overstate. Over 5 billion people now use it. It has transformed commerce, communication, education, entertainment, politics, and countless other domains.
Berners-Lee’s vision was not just technical but philosophical: information should be free, universal, and accessible to all. He could have become a billionaire by commercializing the Web. Instead, he gave it away—and in doing so, changed the world.
Sources
- ACM. “Sir Tim Berners-Lee - A.M. Turing Award Laureate.” Official biography and Turing Award citation.
- CERN. “The birth of the Web.” Official account of the Web’s origins at CERN.
- CERN. “A short history of the Web.” Timeline of the Web’s development.
- World Wide Web Foundation. “Sir Tim Berners-Lee.” Biography and ongoing work.