Tim Berners-Lee

Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee (born 8 June 1955), also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist. He is best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web, HTML, the URL system, and HTTP. He is a professorial research fellow at the University of Oxford and a professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Berners-Lee proposed an information management system on 12 March 1989. In November of that year, he made the first successful connection between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and a server over the Internet. He created the first Web browser and Web server, and he helped the Web grow after that. He is the founder and emeritus director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which looks after the Web's continued development. He also started the World Wide Web Foundation with Rosemary Leith. In 2009, he was elected Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences.

Berners-Lee was once a senior researcher and held the 3Com founder's chair at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He is a director of the Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI) and a member of the advisory board of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. In 2011, he became a member of the board of trustees of the Ford Foundation. He is a founder and president of the Open Data Institute, and he is an advisor at the social network MeWe.

In 2004, Queen Elizabeth II made Berners-Lee a knight to honour his pioneering work. In 2016, he received the Turing Award for inventing the World Wide Web, the first web browser, and the basic rules and methods that let the Web grow to be so large. He was named in the 100 Most Important People of the 20th century list by Time magazine, and he has received a number of other accolades for his invention.

Early life

Berners-Lee was born in London on 8 June 1955. His parents were the mathematicians and computer scientists Mary Lee Berners-Lee (née Woods; 1924–2017) and Conway Berners-Lee (1921–2019). Both of his parents came from Birmingham and worked on the Ferranti Mark 1, the first computer built for sale. He has three younger siblings. His brother, Mike, is a professor of ecology and works on climate change.

He went to Sheen Mount Primary School and then to Emanuel School, a direct grant grammar school at the time, from 1969 to 1973. As a child, he liked to watch trains and trainspotter them. He learnt about electronics by playing with a model railway. In 1976, he earned a first in physics from The Queen's College, Oxford. While he was there, he built a computer from an old television set that he had bought from a repair shop.

Career and research

After graduating, Berners-Lee worked as an engineer at the telecommunications company Plessey in Poole, Dorset. In 1978 he joined D. G. Nash in Ferndown, Dorset, where he helped make software for printers. He then worked as an independent contractor at CERN in Geneva from June to December 1980. There he suggested a project based on hypertext to help researchers share and update information. He also built a early version called ENQUIRE. After leaving CERN, he worked on a "real-time remote procedure call" at a company in Bournemouth, which taught him about computer networking. He returned to CERN as a fellow in 1984. By 1989, CERN was the largest Internet node in Europe. Berners-Lee saw a chance to connect hypertext with the Internet, using the TCP and DNS ideas to create the World Wide Web.

Berners-Lee wrote his proposal in March 1989, and his manager, Mike Sendall, accepted it. Robert Cailliau joined him as a partner. Berners-Lee built the first web browser, an editor called WorldWideWeb that ran on NeXTSTEP. He also built the first Web server, CERN httpd, which used the daemon for the Hypertext Transfer Protocol. He published the first website on 20 December 1990. In August 1991 he posted an invitation for others to work together on Usenet. In 1994 he founded the W3C at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to create standards that would improve the Web. He made his idea free to use, with no patent and no royalties. Berners-Lee later moved to Colehill in Wimborne, East Dorset. In 2004 he took a chair at the University of Southampton to work on the Semantic Web. He also took part in Curl Corp's work on the Curl programming language and has advised the Proton Foundation since 2021.

By 2010, Berners-Lee had helped create data.gov.uk with Nigel Shadbolt. In November 2009 he launched the World Wide Web Foundation. He supports net neutrality, the idea that Internet service providers should not control or watch what customers do online without their clear permission. He also signed an open letter asking the US Federal Communications Commission to cancel a 2017 vote on net neutrality. Berners-Lee appeared at the 2012 Summer Olympics opening ceremony, working on a NeXT Computer. In 2025 he wrote a book about the history of the Internet called This Is for Everyone. In 2012 he helped found the Open Data Institute. In 2013 he led the Alliance for Affordable Internet, which works to make Internet access cheaper in the developing world. He also works at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Solid, a project to give people more control over their data. In 2016 he joined Oxford University as a professorial research fellow and a fellow of Christ Church.

In 2017 Berners-Lee supported the Encrypted Media Extensions proposal, which includes digital rights management. Some groups, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, disagreed with him. In 2018 he launched the open-source company Inrupt to support Solid. In 2019 he and the World Wide Web Foundation launched the Contract for the Web at the Internet Governance Forum. It asked governments and companies to promise to protect the Web from misuse.

Berners-Lee has received many honours. He was knighted in 2004 "for services to the global development of the Internet" and was appointed to the Order of Merit in 2007. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2001. In 2017 he received the Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery. In 2013 he received the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering. In 1999, Time magazine included him among its 100 Most Important People of the 20th century.

Main article: List of awards and honours received by Tim Berners-Lee

Personal life

Berners-Lee has said, "I like to keep work and personal life separate."

Berners-Lee has been married three times. After his final exams in Oxford, he married Jane Northcote in 1976. She was the daughter of Cambridge biologist Don Northcote. The couple moved to Poole to work at Plessey. In 1980, they went to work at CERN together on a six-month contract. After they returned to Britain, they decided to end their marriage. In 1990, he married Nancy Carlson, an American computer programmer who was also working in Switzerland at the World Health Organization. They had two children and divorced in 2011. In 2014, he married Rosemary Leith at the Chapel Royal, St. James's Palace in London. Leith is a Canadian entrepreneur in the Internet and banking fields. She is also a founding director of Berners-Lee's World Wide Web Foundation. The couple also work together on venture capital to support artificial intelligence companies.

Berners-Lee was raised as an Anglican, but he turned away from religion when he was young. After he became a parent, he became a Unitarian Universalist (UU). From 23 to 30 June 2021, the web's source code was sold at auction by Sotheby's in London. It was sold as a non-fungible token (NFT) created by Berners-Lee. It sold for US$5,434,500. The money was reported to be going to fund projects by Berners-Lee and Leith. In 2025, he published a memoir, This Is for Everyone, written with ghostwriter Stephen Witt. Stephen Fry recorded the audiobook. In November 2025, he was a guest on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs. He chose "Brothers in Arms" by Dire Straits, "End of the Line" by the Traveling Wilburys, and "Four Strong Winds" by Ian & Sylvia. For his luxury item, he chose a chromatic harmonica.

Views

Berners-Lee sees Wikipedia as probably the best example of what he wanted the World Wide Web to be. In his book This is for Everyone, he writes that Wikipedia has grown to contain millions of articles on subjects people know about. He thinks it is a valuable collection of human knowledge and one of the modern wonders of the world. He says what made this work was intercreativity, which means people being creative together.

Berners-Lee also supports the idea of a universal basic income.

Books

Tim Berners-Lee has written books about the World Wide Web. In 1999, he wrote Weaving the Web with Mark Fischetti. The book explains how he first designed the Web and where he hoped it would go. In 2025, he published This is for Everyone, which tells the story of the World Wide Web, a story that is still being written.