Tim Berners-Lee
The inventor of the World Wide Web (WWW)
Let's see the highlights of TimBL's biography:
- 1955 - Born in London by Mary Lee Woods and Conway Berners-Lee, computer scientists who worked on the first commercially built computer, the Ferranti Mark 1
- 1969 - Attends Emanuel School in south west London. As a child, learns about electronics from tinkering with a model railway.
- 1976 - Graduates from Oxford University receiving a first-class Bachelor of Arts degree in physics and starts working as an engineer at the telecommunications company Plessey in Poole, Dorset
- 1978 - Joins D. G. Nash in Ferndown, Dorset, helping create typesetting software for printers
- 1980 - Works as an independent contractor at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) from June to December and then as a technical director at John Poole's Image Computer Systems, Ltd, in Bournemouth, Dorset
- 1984 - Returns to CERN as a fellow
- 1989 - Designs and builds the first web browser, the World Wide Web
- 1990 - Publishes the first website
- 1994 - Founds the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- 2001 - Becomes a patron of the East Dorset Heritage Trust
- 2004 - Accepts a chair in computer science at the School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, Hampshire, to work on the Semantic Web
- 2009 - Co-founds the World Wide Web Foundation with his second wife Rosemary Leith, a Canadian Internet and banking entrepreneur
- 2013 - Receives the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering
- 2016 - Joins the Department of Computer Science at Oxford University as a professorial research fellow
- 2017 - Receives the 2016 Turing Award "for inventing the World Wide Web, the first web browser, and the fundamental protocols and algorithms allowing the Web to scale"
"I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the TCP and DNS ideas and—ta-da!—the World Wide Web."
— Tim Berners-Lee