Tim Berners-Lee
More info
- Born
- Known for
- Invented the World Wide Web
- Awards
- Turing Award 2016
- Nationality
- British
Wrote a proposal at CERN in 1989 that his manager annotated "vague but exciting" — and thereby built the web.
The problem was concrete: researchers came and went at CERN, and documentation was scattered across incompatible systems. The solution combined three existing ideas into something new — hypertext, a uniform addressing scheme and a simple transfer protocol. By the end of 1990 there was HTML, the URL, HTTP, the first server and the first browser.
The decisive choice was not technical. In 1993 CERN released the technology into the public domain with no licence fees — unlike Gopher, which that same year began charging. Berners-Lee founded the W3C in 1994 and has since campaigned on decentralisation and personal control of data, notably through the Solid project.