Tim Berners-Lee

Tim Berners-Lee

In the complex history of innovation flowing to and from the Internet, one major achievement is uncontested: in 1989-91, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web.

Tim Berners-Lee was born in 1955 in London, England. His parents were both mathematicians, who worked on the Ferranti Mark I, the first computer to be sold commercially. Berners-Lee's childhood hobby was electronics. When he entered Queen's College at Oxford University in 1972, Berners-Lee chose to major in Physics, hoping to utilize his native talents in both scientific theory and practical application.

While at Oxford, Berners-Lee built his first computer. Soon after graduating in 1976, he became an independent software consultant. In this capacity, he spent the latter half of 1980 in Geneva, Switzerland, at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory. While off-duty at CERN, Berners-Lee was pursuing a personal project: an information-storage program that encompassed random associations ("links") between generally unrelated items. This program, called "Enquire," was the conceptual groundwork for what became the Web.

Tim Berners-Lee

Tim Berners-Lee

Tim Berners-Lee

Tim Berners-Lee

Tim Berners-Lee

Tim Berners-Lee

Tim Berners-Lee

Tim Berners-Lee

Tim Berners-Lee

Tim Berners-Lee

Tim Berners-Lee

Tim Berners-Lee

Tim Berners-Lee

Tim Berners-Lee

Tim Berners-Lee