Tim Berners-Lee
Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web and gave it away. Born in London in 1955 to two mathematicians who had both worked on the Ferranti Mark 1, one of the first commercial computers, he grew up in a household where computing was ordinary. He read physics at Oxford and built a computer from a television set and a processor. He worked at CERN as a contractor in 1980 and wrote a program called Enquire to keep track of who was working on what — a personal database of linked documents. He returned in 1984, and the problem he faced was institutional. CERN had thousands of researchers from dozens of countries using incompatible machines, formats and networks, and information was constantly lost when people left. In March 1989 he submitted a proposal for a distributed hypertext system. His manager wrote on it that it was vague but exciting. He built it over the following two years: HTML for the documents, HTTP for transferring them, URLs to address them, the first browser and editor, and the first server, running on a NeXT machine with a label asking people not to switch it off. The first page went live in 1990, and the first outside CERN in 1991. The decisive act came in 1993, when CERN released the technology into the public domain royalty-free at his urging. Competing systems charged fees; the Web did not, and it won. He founded the World Wide Web Consortium in 1994, and has since campaigned on net neutrality, privacy and decentralisation. He was knighted in 2004.
- Lived: 1955 CE – ?
- Nationality: British
- Roles: inventor, scientist
