Tim Berners-Lee
Berners-Lee, Tim
The man who invented the web while working at the Center for European Particle Research (CERN). Now Director of the web Consortium.
Tim Berners-Lee graduated from the Queen's College at Oxford University, England, 1976. Whilst there he built his first computer with a soldering iron, TTL gates, an M6800 processor and an old television.
He then went on to work for Plessey Telecommunications, and D.G. Nash Ltd (where he wrote software for intelligent printers and a multi-tasking operating system), before joining CERN, where he designed a program called 'Enquire', which was never published, but formed the conceptual basis for today's web.
In 1984, he took up a fellowship at CERN, and in 1989, he wrote the first web server, "httpd", and the first client, "WorldWideWeb" a hypertext browser/editor which ran under NEXTSTEP. The program "WorldWideWeb" was first made available within CERN in December, and on the Internet as a whole in the summer of 1991.
In 1994, Tim joined the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 1999, he became the first holder of the 3Com Founders chair. He is also the author of "Weaving the Web", on the past present and future of the Web.
In 2001, Tim was made a fellow of The Royal Society.
Tim is married to Nancy Carlson. They have two children, born 1991 and 1994.