Tim Berners-Lee
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Independent scholar. Author of A Change of State: The Political Cultures of Technical Practice at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, 1930–1945.
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Tim Berners-Lee, in full Sir Tim Berners-Lee, (born June 8, 1955, London, England), British computer scientist, generally credited as the inventor of the World Wide Web. In 2004 he was awarded a knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom and the inaugural Millennium Technology Prize (€1 million) by the Finnish Technology Award Foundation.
Computing came naturally to Berners-Lee, as both of his parents worked on the Ferranti Mark I, the first commercial computer. (See computer: The first stored-program machines.) After graduating in 1976 from the University of Oxford, Berners-Lee designed computer software for two years at Plessey Telecommunications Ltd., located in Poole, Dorset, England. Following this, he had several positions in the computer industry, including a stint from June to December 1980 as a software engineering consultant at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory in Geneva.
While at CERN, Berners-Lee developed a program for himself, called Enquire, that could store information in files that contained connections (“links”) both within and among separate files—a technique that became known as hypertext. After leaving CERN, Berners-Lee worked for Image Computer Systems Ltd., located in Ferndown, Dorset, where he designed a variety of computer systems. In 1984 he returned to CERN to work on the design of the laboratory’s computer network, developing procedures that allowed diverse computers to communicate with one another and researchers to control remote machines. In 1989 Berners-Lee drew up a proposal for creating a global hypertext document system that would make use of the Internet. His goal was to provide researchers with the ability to share their results, techniques, and practices without having to exchange e-mail constantly. Instead, researchers would place such information “online,” where their peers could immediately retrieve it anytime, day or night. Berners-Lee wrote the software for the first Web server (the central repository for the files to be shared) and the first Web client, or “browser” (the program to access and display files retrieved from the server), between October 1990 and the summer of 1991. The first “killer application” of the Web at CERN was the laboratory’s telephone directory—a mundane beginning for one of the technological wonders of the computer age.
From 1991 to 1993 Berners-Lee evangelized the Web. In 1994 in the United States he established the World Wide Web (W3) Consortium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Laboratory for Computer Science. The consortium, in consultation with others, lends oversight to the Web and the development of standards. In 1999 Berners-Lee became the first holder of the 3Com Founders chair at the Laboratory for Computer Science. His numerous other honours included the National Academy of Engineering’s prestigious Charles Stark Draper Prize (2007). Berners-Lee was the author, along with Mark Fischetti, of Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web (2000).
Tim Berners-Lee
Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989.
He is the co-founder and CTO of Inrupt.com, a tech start-up which uses, promotes and helps develop the open source Solid platform. Solid aims to give people control and agency over their data, questioning many assumptions about how the web has to work. Solid technically is a new level of standard at the web layer, which adds things never put into the original spec, such as global single sign-on, universal access control, and a universal data API so that any app can store data in any storage place. Socially Solid is a movement away from much of the issues with the current WWW, and toward a world in which users are in control, and empowered by large amounts of data, private, shared, and public.
Sir Tim is the Founder, Emeritus Director, and an Honorary Member of the Board of Directors of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a Web standards organization that he founded in 1994 which develops interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) to lead the Web to its full potential. He is a Director of the World Wide Web Foundation which was launched in 2009 to coordinate efforts to further the potential of the Web to benefit humanity.
A graduate of Oxford University, Sir Tim invented the Web while at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory, in 1989. He wrote the first web client and server in 1990. His specifications of URIs, HTTP and HTML were refined as Web technology spread.
He is the Emeritus 3Com Founders Professor of Engineering in the School of Engineering with a joint appointment in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Laboratory for Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence ( CSAIL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he founded the Decentralized Information Group (DIG).
The Decentralized Information Group, works on the Solid Project to give people control of their own data and to re-decentralize the Web. He is the co-founder and CTO of inrupt, the company launched to ensure the success of the Solid platform and its open source community, and to build the ecosystem that supports it.
He is also a Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Oxford, UK. He is President of and founded the Open Data Institute in London. He is President of London’s Open Data Institute.
In 2001 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society. He has been the recipient of several international awards including the Japan Prize, the Prince of Asturias Foundation Prize, the Millennium Technology Prize and Germany’s Die Quadriga award. In 2004 he was knighted by H.M. Queen Elizabeth and in 2007 he was awarded the Order of Merit. In 2009 he was elected a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences. He is the author of «Weaving the Web».
On March 18 2013, Sir Tim, along with Vinton Cerf, Robert Kahn, Louis Pouzin and Marc Andreesen, was awarded the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering for «ground-breaking innovation in engineering that has been of global benefit to humanity.»
Sir Tim has promoted open government data globally and spends time fighting for rights such as net neutrality, privacy and the openness of the Web.
On 4 April 2017, Sir Tim was awarded the ACM A.M. Turing Prize for inventing the World Wide Web, the first web browser, and the fundamental protocols and algorithms allowing the Web to scale. The Turing Prize, called the «Nobel Prize of Computing» is considered one of the most prestigious awards in Computer Science.
In September 2022, he won the Seoul Peace Prize for his work promoting data sovereignty and leading the movement to “decentralize” the web dominated by tech giants.
Contact
Email: Chief of Staff cos@timbl.com PGP fingerprint 4D4B 9D1D C032 0710 3CDC DE0B 344D 9666 1177 9EE7 PGP Key Address W3C/MIT/CSAIL 32 Vassar Street
Cambridge MA 02139
USA
Identity on Wikipedia Timbl
Talks, articles, interviews, etc
- «The World Wide Web — A Mid-Course Correction,» The Richard Dimbleby Lecture, November 2019
- A Magna Carta for the Web, TED talk, 2014
- The Year Open Data Went Worldwide, TED talk, 2010
- The Next Web, TED talk, 2009
Essays and articles in text form
- We Need to Change How We Share Our Personal Data Online in the Age of COVID-19, Time magazine, 15 July 2020
- Tim Berners-Lee thinks the world can be better after Covid-19, Quartz, 30 June 2020
- Covid-19 makes it clearer than ever: access to the internet should be a universal right, The Guardian, 4 June 2020
- Why the web needs to work for women and girls, The World Wide Web Foundation, 2020
- I Invented the World Wide Web. Here’s How We Can Fix It, OpEd, New York Times, 24 November 2019
- Where Does the World Wide Web Go From Here?, Wired, 3 November 2019
- 30 years on, what’s next #ForTheWeb?, The World Wide Web Foundation, 2019
- One Small Step for the Web…, Inrupt, November 2018
- The web is under threat. Join us and fight for it, The World Wide Web Foundation, 2018
- Three challenges for the web, according to its inventor, The World Wide Web Foundation, 2017
- The many meanings of Open, Telefonica, 2013
- «Tim Berners-Lee on the Web at 25: the past, present and future”, Wired, 23 August 2014
- Long Live the Web: A Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality Scientific American Noverber 2010
- «Linked Data» (slides) at the TED 2009 conference, «The Great Unveiling» in Long Beach, CA, USA, 4 February 2009.
- The Future of the Web. Testimony before the United States House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet. (2007-03-01)
- The Mobile Web Keynote, 3GSM Barcelona, (2007-02-22)
- Speech and the Future Keynote, SpeechTek New York, (2004-09-14)
- Comment on the ‘906 patent (2003)
- Japan Prize commemorative lecture on the universality of the Web (2002)
- Michael Dertouzos R.I.P. (2001-08-27)
- D.M.Sendall. R.I.P. July 15 1999
- The future of the Web — LCS 35th anniversary talk transcript
- WWW, UU and I — Unitarian Universalism and the Web (1998/4)
- A one-page personal history of the web (1998/5/7)
- Realizing the full potential of the web (1997/12/3)
- World-Wide Computer Communications of the ACM, February 1997, Vol. 40 No 2.
- The web: Past, Present and Future (1996)
- The Web; Europe and the US; Harmony and Diversity (1996)
- Hypertext and Our Collective Destiny , (1995)
- Presentation to CDA challenge by CDT et al , 28 Feb 1996
- Original proposal for a global hypertext project at CERN (1989)
- Rethinking Digital Access, BBC «Rethink» podcast, 24 June 2020
- World wide web founder scales up efforts to reshape internet, Forbes, 22 February 2020
- The World Wide Web Turns 30 Today. Here’s How Its Inventor Thinks We Can Fix It, Time Magazine, 12 March 2019
- “I was devastated”: Tim Berners-Lee, the man who created the world wide web, has some regrets, Vanity Fair, 1 July 2018
- «The Web’s Creator Looks to Reinvent It”, New York Times, 7 June 2016
- «Putting data back into the hands of owners”, TechCrunch, 20 December 2016
If you want to know what we are working on now, look at the W3C site and check out all the activities at W3C. Also see:
- Design Issues: Technical and philosophical notes on web architecture An occasional series of notes about how the web actually works and how to design new technology.
- For a list of past talks, see: Presentations via the W3C Presentations system or an extensive list in HTML.
- Disclosures
- History of the web: some pointers
Speaking Engagements
I do a limited amount of speaking. If you have something you think I would be interested in speaking at, for academic events email timbl+speaking@w3.org with details of the event, projected audience size and profile, location and date.
My professional speaking is handled by Jana Padula at the Harry Walker Agency, (janap@harrywalker.com) (you may also cc Don Walker donw@harrywalker.com and please cc me as above).
Please use an email subject line with relevant information such as: : «Keynote in Milan, 23 Febrary 2100 at ISWC2100» including the date and place proposed.
AV Requirements
If I use slides (I often do not) I use a laptop — currently a Mac running OSX. I do not need audio from the laptop.
Press: requesting interviews and materials
If you need a photo for publication, please complete the W3C photo request form. You do not need an account to complete the form, but an email address is required.
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If you need an interview for an article, please check the
first, then please use email rather than phone. Please contact w3t-pr@w3.org the general PR request line at W3C, rather than Amy van der Hiel (my assistant) or my Chief of Staff (cos@timbl.com) or Coralie Mercier (Head of Communications at W3C) to set up interviews with me or with other W3C staff.
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