Tim Berners-Lee
is a British computer scientist. He is credited with
creating the World Wide Web and enabling anyone with
a computer to navigate the Internet and access its information. Berners-Lee
developed software for encoding documents, linking documents, and addressing
documents on the Internet so that documents could be linked worldwide.
Specifically, he is best known for having introduced the concept of using hypertext with the Transmission Control Protocol and domain name system in order to permit sharing and updating information by scientific researchers on the Internet. These concepts became the building blocks of the World Wide Web.
The hypertext project was conducted while he was consulting as a software engineer at the Conseil European pour la Recherche Nucleaire (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland in 1980. While working again at CERN in 1990, he wrote the coding language HyperText Mark-Up Language (HTML) to permit Internet users to add links into their text, an addressing system which gave each Web page a unique location on the Web (the domain system), and designed a set of rules known as HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), to allow documents to be linked together on computers across the Internet.
Berners-Lee was born in 1955 in London, England. He studied physics and computers at Queen’s College, Oxford, from which he graduated with a physics degree in 1976. He developed an interest in computers in boyhood. His parents helped design the first commercially available computer, the Ferranti Mark I. Berners-Lee built his first computer while in college.
In the mid-1990’s while working at the Laboratory for Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Berners-Lee became the Director of the W3 Consortium. The Consortium has made version 3.2 of HTML a widely used standard, which facilitates using the Web for the average computer user. The Consortium has advocated the use of a chip to help parents control the websites their children could view.
As use of the Web for business and development applications has exploded in the past nearly two decades, Berners-Lee has consistently been an advocate for keeping navigation of the World Wide Web open, non-proprietary, and free of charge.
Berners-Lee has been awarded a number of prizes, culminating in the Order of Merit from the Queen of England on June 13, 2007.
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