He invented the Web in 1990 — then gave it away for free.
Tim Berners-Lee (born 1955) is the British computer scientist who invented the World Wide Web: at CERN in 1990 he built the first web browser and the first web server, and defined the URL, HTTP and HTML — then released the whole thing royalty-free in 1993.
An Oxford physics graduate working at Europe's particle-physics laboratory, he wanted a way for scientists to share documents across incompatible computers. His 1989 proposal, 'Information Management', became the foundation of the modern internet age.
Berners-Lee was born in London in 1955 to parents who both worked on one of Britain's first computers, the Ferranti Mark 1. After Oxford he joined CERN, the Geneva laboratory, where thousands of researchers lost documents in incompatible systems.
His March 1989 memo proposed a web of hypertext documents linked across the internet. His boss called it 'vague, but exciting' — and let him build it. An earlier program of his, ENQUIRE, had already explored the idea of linked information.
On a NeXT computer at CERN, Berners-Lee wrote the first web browser — called WorldWideWeb — and the first web server, defining the three technologies that still run the Web: URLs to address documents, HTTP to fetch them, HTML to write them. The first website, info.cern.ch, explained the project itself.
The server's label read: 'This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!' By 1991 the Web was open to the outside world; the Mosaic browser of 1993 made it easy, and growth exploded.
In April 1993 CERN declared the Web technology free for anyone to use, forever — no patents, no royalties. Berners-Lee never cashed in; the decision is why a student in Nairobi and a startup in Seoul could build on the same open foundation.
He founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in 1994 to keep standards open, was knighted in 2004, and received the Turing Award in 2016. Through the Web Foundation and the Solid project, he still campaigns for a Web that serves everyone — the inventor guarding his gift.
