Sometimes called "The Creator of the Web," Tim Berners-Lee wove the World Wide Web and created a mass medium for the 21st century from the thousands of interconnected threads of the Internet. After graduating from the Queen's College at Oxford University in 1976, he built his first computer with a soldering iron, TTL gates, an M6800 processor and an old television.
Berners-Lee spent two years with Plessey Telecommunications Ltd., a major UK telecom equipment manufacturer, working on distributed transaction systems, message relays and bar code technology. In 1978, he left Plessey to join D.G. Nash Ltd., where he wrote among other things, typesetting software for intelligent printers and a multi-tasking operating system.
Berners-Lee then spent a year-and-a-half as an independent consultant that included a six-month stint as a consultant software engineer at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. While there he wrote for his own private use his first program for storing information, including using random associations. Named "Enquire," and never published, this program formed the conceptual basis for the future development of the World Wide Web.
In 1989, he proposed a global hypertext project to be known as the World Wide Web. Based on the earlier "Enquire" work, it was designed to allow people to work together by combining their knowledge in a web of hypertext documents. He wrote the first World Wide Web server, "httpd," and the first client, "World Wide Web," a what-you-see-is-what-you-get hypertext browser/editor that ran in the NeXTStep environment. This work was started in October 1990, and the program, "World Wide Web" first made available within CERN in December, and on the Internet at large in the summer of 1991.
Through 1991 and 1993, Mr. Berners-Lee continued working on the design of the Web, coordinating feedback from users across the Internet. His initial specifications of URLs, http and HTML were refined and discussed in larger circles as the Web technology spread.
In 1994, he joined the Laboratory for Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 1999 he became the first holder o the 3Copm Founders chair. He is director of the World Wide Web Consortium, which coordinated Web development worldwide, with teams at MIT, INRIA in France, and at Keio University in Japan. The Consortium takes as its goal to lead the Web to its full potential, ensuring its stability through rapid evolution and revolutionary transformations of its usage.
His book, Weaving the Web (Harper San Francisco, 1999) written with Mark Fischett, puts the thoughtful, understated inventor's role in proper historical perspective.