Tim Berners-Lee (1955- )
Known as the father of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee graduated from the Queen’s College, Oxford, England in 1976. He spent two years with Plessey Telecommunications before joining DG Nash Ltd where he wrote typesetting software and a multi-tasking operating system. He joined CERN, (the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland) as a consultant software engineer in 1980 for six months. While he was there, he wrote for his own private use his first program for storing information named “Enquire”, which formed the conceptual basis for the World Wide Web. In 1984 he took up a fellowship with CERN. Building on his ideas, he constructed a “hypertext” notebook, where files could be linked to other files on his computer. He then extended this system to link files not only on his computer, but across the Internet to the world. In 1989 he developed and proposed an easy to learn coding system that did just this, HTML (Hypertext Mark-up Language) and the URL (Universal Resource Locator) addressing scheme. Then he created the world’s very first browser, to allow anyone across the world to read HTML files. In 1991 the World Wide Web was born.

In 1994, he joined the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) at MIT, (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and became the first holder of the 3Com Founders' chair. He is director of the World Wide Web Consortium which co-ordinates web development worldwide.

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