Tim Berners-Lee

Tim Berners-Lee is a British software engineer credited with inventing the World Wide Web in 1989 while at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. Berners-Lee enabled a system to be able to view web pages (hypertext documents) through the internet. He is director of the World Wide Web Consortium, which he founded, and is a professor in the computer science department at the University of Oxford. In 2001, he became a fellow of the Royal Society; in 2004, he was knighted; and in 2007, he was appointed Order of Merit.

Timothy John Berners-Lee was born on June 8, 1955, in London, UK, to Mary Lee Woods and Conway Berners-Lee. He has three siblings (1 sister and 2 brothers) and grew up in London. His parents both worked on the first commercially built computer, the Ferranti Mark 1, and Tim was fascinated by computers from a young age. As a child, Berners-Lee was a keen train-spotter and learned about electronics by playing with his model railway.

Berners-Lee went to Sheen Mount primary school before attending Emanuel school between 1969 and 1973. After finishing school, Berners-Lee enrolled at Queen's College, University of Oxford in 1973. He graduated in 1976 with a first-class degree in physics. While at Oxford, Berners-Lee built his first computer using an old television and a soldering iron.

After graduating from the University of Oxford, Berners-Lee was appointed as an engineer at the telecommunications company Plessey, in Poole, Dorset. During two years at Plessey, he worked on distributed transaction systems, message relays, and bar code technology. In 1978, he joined D.G. Nash Ltd, where he learned to write typesetting software for printers and a multitasking operating system.

In the late 1970s, Berners-Lee became an independent software consultant for many companies, including the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), where he spent June to December 1980. Berners-Lee arrived at CERN to find 10,000 scientists and support staff working on a range of experiments and generating vast amounts of data. He immediately spotted issues regarding data storage and access. Experimental data and supporting documentation were stored on a variety of computers in various formats. It was difficult to track down everything that might be relevant to someone's research, and a lot of information was getting lost.

To link information across different sources, Berner-Lee began working on a hypertext system called ENQUIRE, named after a Victorian-era domestic handbook that he had read as a child called Enquire Within Upon Everything.Berners-Lee's new system organized items of information into virtual "cards," each of which could be linked to any other card. ENQUIRE was made primarily for Berners-Lee's own use and was a side-project. He was primarily hired by CERN to work on a vacuum control state visualization program. The hypertext-based program, ENQUIRE, lay the conceptual foundation for the development of the World Wide Web.

Cover letter and first page of the original ENQUIRE V 1.1 manual from October 1980.

Only at CERN as an independent software consultant, Berners-Lee left to begin working at Image Computer Systems, Ltd in 1980. Spending three years at the company, he gained experience in computer networking, working on real-time control firmware, graphics, communications software, and a generic macro language.

Berners-Lee returned to CERN as a fellow in 1984. Five years later, after gaining experience in real-time data acquisition systems, Berners-Lee proposed a global hypertext database where every package of data would have a distinct “Universal Document Identifier” (UDI), which any network user could use to retrieve that data. On March 12th, 1989, he wrote a proposal for his communication system within the organization, which eventually led to the conceptualization of the World Wide Web—an information-sharing system that could be implemented throughout the world. The original proposal can be found here.

The internet had been under development since the 1960s as a way to transfer information between different computers and was running by 1983, developed by Vinton Cerf and others. In the 1980s, the internet was an international network of computers that could deliver “packets” of information from one “address” to another—the most familiar example being e-mail.

Berners-Lee’s vision was to create a comprehensive collection of information in word, sound, and image, each discretely identified by UDIs and interconnected by hypertext links, then use the internet to provide universal access to that collection of information. Every source of information (what we now think of as web pages) would have a unique address, in a standard form, known as a uniform resource locator or URL. Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) created a simple way of linking documents on the internet, allowing users to navigate between one page and another. He also created a piece of software that presented documents in an easy-to-read format—the browser.

Berners-Lee acknowledges many of the ideas behind the World Wide Web did not originate with him, and some of the essential elements of the web were in place by the time he began working on it. Computers were already linked over the internet using the TCP/IP protocol. Storing information with inbuilt links had been around for a long time and built on Ted Nelson and Douglas Engelbart's work on hyperlinks in the 1960s. Berners-Lee has said his contribution was to put all the technologies together in one comprehensive package:

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

By 1990, Berners-Lee and his team were working with the NeXT computer, which had an advanced operating system, making it possible for them to rapidly develop software to demonstrate the features of the World Wide Web.

The original NeXT computer used by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN.

In late 1990, he composed the first server, “httpd,” and hypertext browser/editor, “WorldWideWeb." In the summer of 1991, Berners-Lee made the web available on the internet. By giving the specifications for HyperText Markup Language (HTML), HTTP, and URLs, Berners-Lee made it relatively easy for anyone with Internet access to contribute and collect information.

The world’s first website, Info.cern.ch, went online on August 6, 1991, running on a NeXT computer at CERN. The first web page address was http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html. The site provided information on the World Wide Web and how it could be used for sharing information.

World's first website - screenshot taken in 1992.

The web became available for universal use on April 30, 1993, when CERN published a statement making the World Wide Web available on a royalty-free basis. Rather than monetizing the World Wide Web, Berners-Lee chose to make it freely available with no patent or royalties.

By the mid-1990s, the web had found widespread use in academia and industry, primarily thanks to Mosaic, a simple-to-use browser made by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina. In 1994, Berners-Lee formed the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the Laboratory for Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The organization aims to improve the quality and standard of the World Wide Web and develops interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) to lead the web to its full potential.

Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1994.

W3C was founded in collaboration with CERN, with support from DARPA and the European Commission. In April 1995, INRIA (Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et Automatique) became the first European W3C host, followed by Keio University of Japan (Shonan Fujisawa Campus) in Asia in 1996. As of 2022, Berner-Lee still leads W3C as director, alongside CEO Dr. Jeffrey Jaffe, W3C CEO. The consortium is supported by a staff of technical experts who help coordinate technology development and manage operations.

Berners-Lee holds an endowed chair at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). As a senior research scientist, he heads CSAIL’s Decentralized Information Group. The Decentralized Information Group works on the Solid project, which aims to give people control of their own data and to re-decentralize the web. In autumn 2018, Berners-Lee announced the launch of Inrupt, a commercial venture built on the Solid platform. The tech startup uses, promotes, and helps develop the open-source Solid platform. Solid aims to give people control and agency over their data.

In 2009, Berners-Lee co-founded the World Wide Web Foundation with Rosemary Leith. The Foundation campaigns for a web that is safe and empowering for everyone. Berners-Lee is a Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Oxford and president and founder of the Open Data Institute in London.