Tim Berners-Lee Biography

BIRTH: June 8, 1955 London, England

Tim Berners-Lee Biography : Facts, Life, Invention

Tim Berners-Lee is a British computer most revolutionary inventions of the twentieth century, the World Wide Web (WWW).

Timothy Berners-Lee was born on June 8, 1955, in London, England, to Mary Lee Woods and Conway Berners-Lee. He has three siblings. His love for computers came from his computing family. For his education, he attended London’s Emanuel School till 1973. After he graduated, he joined the Queen’s College at the University of Oxford. In 1976, he received a degree in physics.

Lee got his first job as an engineer at a tele communications company in Plessey. During the 1970s, he worked with various companies. In 1980, he was hired by CERN as an independent software engineer. He came up with a programme which used hypertext, a language that allows embedding links in text. His programme was called ‘Enquire’. The same programme was also used to build the World Wide Web.

In 1981, he worked at John Poole’s Image Computer Systems Limited. He worked there for three years and gained lots of technical knowledge. A few years later, he went back to CERN. He noticed that hundreds of employees worked at the organization and it was getting difficult for them to manage and share information with each other. He thought of making an easier and more efficient method for data sharing. He presented his plans to CERN. He explained how he planned on distributing information all over the internet.

Around 1989, he was entirely focused on building the web. He created three new systems to make the new web work. They were HTML, HTTP and URL. The first one was the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), a computer language for webpages. The second was the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) used for recovering documents. And the last one was the Universal Resource Locators (URLS), which are the web addresses.

In 1990, with CERN, Lee launched the world’s first website. The first website was simply called info.cern.ch. It was put online in 1991. The site was built to show how people could share information easily and also gather it all in one location.

To improve his web, he founded the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). He decided to keep the technologies royalty-free and open to the public. This meant that anyone could use them and reap the benefits. It changed people’s lives. Lee’s WWW’s impact was the same as that of the invention of the television or the radio, if not more.

In 1999, Lee became the first holder of the 3Com Founders Chair. Lee even protected the freedom of the web. He made it possible to open the information-sharing platform for everyone. He gave every person the right to use the web and advocated for net neutrality. He did not want the government to get involved or put any restrictions on the usage of the WWW.

Not only is Lee a great innovator, but he is also a great teacher and author. In 2004, he worked as a professor in the computer science department at the University of Southampton. In 2006, he became the co-director of the Web Science Trust. The trust was started to study the World Wide Web and propose solutions for its usage and design. In 2009, he worked as a director of the World Wide Web Foundation. Lee worked with the UK government on a project, which made UK data more accessible to the public. Its website was called data.gov.uk. He continued to work with the government and became a member of the Public Sector Transparency Board.

Lee also wrote about the importance of the internet. In 1999, he published his first book called Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web. It narrates his journey of creating the web and the planning that went into it. In 2006, he released A Framework for Web Science, his second book, co-authored by other computer scientists and researchers.

Lee is a recipient of many awards and honors. In 1995, he received The Software System Award. In 1999, he was named as one of the ‘100 Most Important People of the 20th century’ by Time magazine. In the year 2004, he was appointed Honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire and was awarded the Order of Merit for his ‘services to the global development of the internet’.

Lee is one of five Internet and web pioneers, who were awarded with the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering. He was even dubbed as ‘the man who changed the world’. Lee is an inspiration and sensation for his invention which has shaped our society.

Lee was married and divorced twice. He is the father of two children.