INVENTOR OF WORLD WIDE WEB

Berners-Lee in 2010BornTimothy John Berners-Lee

8 June 1955 (age 56)

London, England Residence Massachusetts, U.S.NationalityEnglish Alma materQueen's College, Oxford Occupation Computer scientist Employer

World Wide Web Consortium

University of Southampton Known for

Inventing the World Wide Web

Holder of the 3Com Founders Chair at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Title Professor Religion Unitarian 

Universalism Parents

Conway Berners -Lee

Mary Lee Woods

Sir Timothy John "Tim" Berners-Lee, OM, KBE, FRS, FREng, FRSA (born 8 June 1955), also known as "TimBL", is an Englishcomputer scientist, MIT professor and the inventor of the World Wide Web. He made a proposal for an information management system in March 1989and on 25 December 1990, with the help of Robert Cailliau and a young student at CERN, he implemented the first successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and server via the Internet.

Berners-Lee is the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which oversees the Web's continued development. He is also the founder of the World Wide Web Foundation, and is a senior researcher and holder of the 3Com Founders 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 2004, Berners-Lee was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his pioneering work. In April 2009, he was elected a foreign associate of the United States National Academy of Sciences.

While an independent contractor at CERN from June to December 1980, Berners-Lee proposed a project based on the concept of hypertext, to facilitate sharing and updating information among researchers.While there, he built a prototype system namedENQUIRE.

After leaving CERN in 1980, he went to work at John Poole's Image Computer Systems, Ltd, in Bournemouth, England.The project he worked on was a real-time remote procedure call which gave him experience in computer networking. In 1984 he returned to CERN as a fellow.

In 1989, CERN was the largest Internet node in Europe, and Berners-Lee saw an opportunity to join hypertext with the Internet: "I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to theTransmission Control Protocol and domain name system ideas and—ta-da!—the World Wide Web." “Creating the web was really an act of desperation, because the situation without it was very difficult when I was working at CERN later. Most of the technology involved in the web, like the hypertext, like the Internet, multifont text objects, had all been designed already. I just had to put them together. It was a step of generalising, going to a higher level of abstraction, thinking about all the documentation systems out there as being possibly part of a larger imaginary documentation system.”He wrote his initial proposal in March 1989, and in 1990, with the help of Robert Cailliau (with whom he shared the 1995 ACM Software System Award), produced a revision which was accepted by his manager, Mike Sendall.He used similar ideas to those underlying the ENQUIRE system to create the World Wide Web, for which he designed and built the first Web browser. This also functioned as an editor (WorldWideWeb, running on the NeXTSTEP operating system), and the first Web server, CERN HTTPd (short for Hypertext Transfer Protocoldaemon).