You’re reading this thanks to the work of Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web, HTML, HTTP, and the URL addressing system you use to open web pages. He was born June 8, 1955, in London.
Berners-Lee had an early start in math and technology; his mother was a mathematician and his father was a computer scientist. Among other things, his father (Conway Berners-Lee) worked on the Ferranti Mark 1, the first computer commercially available. He got interested in electronics because he had a model train set that needed lots of tinkering to make it work. He kept up his tinkering hobby at college, where he was officially studying physics, and on the side built a computer out of parts from an old television.
He was working as an engineer and programmer when he got a job consulting for CERN (the European organization that operates the world’s biggest particle accelerator). While he was there he devised a system to make it easier for researchers to share information. He built a prototype that he called ENQUIRE. That demo system just sat for several years while Berners-Lee worked elsewhere — where he learned about computer networking. Then in 1984 he returned to CERN. He revisited his ENQUIRE system, which used hypertext, and realized he could combine it with networking. His w proposal about building a new hypertext system was accepted by CERN management in 1990, and published the first web site that December. He invited anyone who wanted to to collaborate on the project, which he called WorldWideWeb.
The WorldWideWeb project was immediately popular, and as it grew it acquired spaces, becoming the World Wide Web. Just four years later, Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at MIT. His approach, which was adopted by the W3C, was to make his ideas available patent- and royalty-free. He stuck with this position until 2017, when he reluctantly endorsed the Encrypted Media Extensions proposal, which added Digital Rights (or Restrictions) Management to the web. He said he believed digital restrictions were inevitable.
Berners-Lee has been knighted in recognition of his work, and was appointed to the UK Order of Merit by the queen. The Order of Merit is held by only 24 members at any given time. He’s also a fellow of the Royal Society and received the Turing Award from the ACM. In 2021 he auctioned off the original source code for the WorldWideWeb, as a non-fungible token. It sold for over $5 million, which he said he was going to use to fund some new ideas.
