Sir Tim Berners-Lee(1955–)

Timothy John Berners-Lee was born at East Sheen in south-west London on the eighth of June 1955, eldest son of Conway Berners-Lee and Mary Lee Woods, both pioneer computer-scientists who had met at the Ferranti Mark I commercial-computer development team at Manchester in the early 1950s and had moved to London in 1953 on their joint appointment to the Ferranti Computer Department at Bracknell. He was raised in a household in which both parents were professional computer scientists (his mother was one of the first commercial programmers in the world, working on the Ferranti Mark I and the Mark I Star), was schooled at Sheen Mount Primary School and at Emanuel School in south-west London, and took the place at The Queen's College, Oxford, in October 1973 to read Physics. He took the first-class BA in Physics in 1976.

He worked through the late 1970s and early 1980s at the British Plessey Telecommunications Company at Poole, then at the small Dorset firm D.G. Nash, and from 1984 at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) at Geneva, the world's largest particle-physics laboratory, where he was hired as a software-engineering consultant on the document-management system that supported the experimental-physics research programme. He drafted in March 1989 the internal CERN memorandum Information Management: A Proposal in his thirty-fourth year, the foundational document of the World Wide Web. The proposal sketched a hypertext-based universal information system in which any document at any computer connected to the global Internet could be retrieved by a single universal address, formatted in a universal markup language, and transmitted by a universal protocol.

He built the system across the next two years at CERN on a NeXTcube workstation. He wrote the HyperText Markup Language (HTML) specification through the autumn of 1990, the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) specification through the same period, and the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI, later the URL) addressing scheme. He completed the first web browser and the first web server, both named WorldWideWeb, on the NeXTcube on Christmas Day 1990. He opened the first publicly accessible website, the info.cern.ch server at CERN, in August 1991. He released the three technical specifications under unrestricted public licence in 1993, the decision that committed the World Wide Web to the open-protocol architecture on which it has continued for the next thirty-three years.

He founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in October 1994 in his fortieth year as the standards body of the Web, and has served as Director of the W3C continuously since. He founded the World Wide Web Foundation in 2009 to expand internet access in the developing world, and the Open Data Institute in London in 2012 with Sir Nigel Shadbolt. He was knighted in 2004 (the youngest scientist to be knighted at the time), was admitted to the Order of Merit in 2007 (one of only twenty-four living holders at any time), was awarded the Turing Award (the highest single honour in computer science) in 2017, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2001. He held the 3Com Founders Chair at MIT 1994 to 2016 and is now Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Oxford.

The World Wide Web today comprises over two billion individual websites and is used by over five billion people worldwide. The technical foundations he laid in 1990 and 1991 (HTML, HTTP, the URL scheme) are still the operational architecture of every web page in existence. The Lee name in modern engineering carries the weight of the March 1989 CERN proposal and the Christmas Day 1990 first website.