Sir Tim Berners-Lee
Sir Timothy Berners-Lee, the
inventor of the World Wide Web, has been based at the Laboratory for
Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
since 1994. He directs the W3 Consortium, an open forum of companies and
organisations whose objectives are to realise the full potential of the
Web, ensuring its stability through the rapid evolution and
revolutionary transformations of its usage.
Having graduated from Queen’s College, Oxford University with 1st class
Honours in Physics Tim spent 2 years with Plessey Telecommunications Ltd
(Poole, UK) where he worked on distributed transaction systems, message
relays and bar code technology. He then joined D G Nash Ltd (Ferndown,
UK), where amongst other things, we wrote typesetting software for
intelligent printers, and a multi-tasking operating system. Having
gained this experience, Tim took up a fellowship at CERN, Switzerland,
to work on distributed real-time systems for scientific data acquisition
and system control. In 1989, he proposed a global hypertext project, to
be known as the World Wide Web. This work was started in October 1990,
and the programme “World Wide Web” first became available within CERN in
December, and on the Internet at large in the summer of 1991. He is the
author of “Weaving the Web”, on the past, present and future of the web.
Tim Berners-Lee has received many awards in recognition of his
achievements. In 2004 he was listed in the New Year´s Honours List for a
Knighthood (KBE) for services to the global development of the Internet
and was knighted by HM the Queen on 16 July 2004.