Tim Berners-Lee

Both his parents had worked on the Ferranti Mark 1, the first computer anyone sold commercially, so the arithmetic in the house was unusual. He was a trainspotter and learned his electronics tinkering with a model railway. Sheen Mount, then Emanuel School, then the Queen's College, Oxford, where he took a first in physics in 1976 and built himself a computer out of a television bought from a repair shop. He married straight out of finals and went to Plessey in Poole as a telecommunications engineer, then to a small firm writing typesetting software. A six-month contract carried him to CERN in 1980, where he wrote a program called Enquire to keep track of who did what. Then he left, and spent three years on remote procedure calls in Bournemouth.

CERN in 1989 was Europe's largest internet node and had a filing problem: thousands of physicists, no way to find what any of them had written. On 12 March 1989 he handed his manager a proposal. Mike Sendall wrote vague but exciting on the cover and let him carry on. By mid-November he had a browser talking to a server, and on 20 December 1990 the first website went up on a CERN NeXT machine, explaining what a website was. He had written three things that had to work together and did: an address scheme, a transfer protocol, a markup language. On 30 April 1993 CERN released the code with no licence fee and no patent, and it stopped being a physics tool. He founded the World Wide Web Consortium at MIT the following year on a royalty-free rule.

He took no patent and no royalty on the Web, which is the fact everyone cites. Two others sit against it. In March 2017, with the World Wide Web Consortium split over a proposal to write a digital rights management hook into the browser standard, Berners-Lee backed it, reasoning that such controls were coming regardless. The consortium published the standard on 18 September that year and the Electronic Frontier Foundation resigned from the body the same day in an open letter. Then in June 2021 he consigned the original source code to Sotheby's as a non-fungible token, and it sold for 5,434,500 dollars. He has also spent 20 years saying the Web has gone wrong — too centralised, too surveilled — while running the organisation that sets its rules and founding a company, Inrupt, to sell the remedy.

The honours came early: a knighthood in 2004, the Order of Merit in 2007, the first Queen Elizabeth Prize in 2013, the Turing Award in 2016. At the 2012 Olympics he typed This is for everyone into the stadium lights from a vintage NeXT. In 2025 he made the phrase the title of a memoir. He closed the World Wide Web Foundation in 2024, saying its work was done, and put the time into Solid and the case for people holding their own data. He is a research fellow at Oxford and professor emeritus at MIT. No verdict has settled: he is at once the most decorated living computer scientist and the most persistent critic of what he made.

Tim Berners-Lee's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• Enquire invention
  The CERN prototype that kept track of who worked on what 1980
• Information Management: A Proposal article
  His manager wrote vague but exciting on the cover 1989
• WorldWideWeb browser and the CERN server invention
  The first browser and the first web server, on a NeXT machine 1990
• info.cern.ch other
  The first website, published 20 December, explaining what a website was 1990
• World Wide Web Consortium company
  Founded at MIT on a royalty-free standards rule 1994
• This Is for Everyone book
  A memoir written with Stephen Witt 2025

• 1976 aged ~21 Takes a first in physics at the Queen's College, Oxford He had built himself a computer from a secondhand television.
• 1980 aged ~25 Writes Enquire during a six-month contract at CERN Then left for three years of remote procedure call work in Bournemouth.
• March 12, 1989 aged 33 Submits the proposal that becomes the World Wide Web Mike Sendall marked it vague but exciting and let him proceed.
• December 20, 1990 aged 35 Publishes the first website at info.cern.ch
• April 30, 1993 aged 37 CERN releases the Web code with no fee and no patent The decision that separated the Web from every rival hypertext system.
• 1994 aged ~39 Founds the World Wide Web Consortium at MIT
• July 27, 2012 aged 57 Types This is for everyone at the London Olympics opening ceremony Working at a vintage NeXT computer in the stadium.
• September 18, 2017 aged 62 The W3C publishes the DRM standard he backed and the EFF resigns He had come out for Encrypted Media Extensions in March of that year.
• June 2021 aged 65 Sells the original Web source code at Sotheby's as an NFT It fetched 5,434,500 dollars.

• Bob Kahn b. 1938
  Co-inventor of the TCP/IP protocols alongside Vint Cerf, enabling modern digital communication. built on his protocols
• Vint Cerf b. 1943
  Co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols that form the foundation of the internet. built on his protocols
• Marc Andreessen b. 1971
  Co-author of the first web browser and co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, a leading venture capital firm. wrote the browser that made it popular
• Aaron Swartz 1986–2013
  Internet activist and Reddit co-founder whose work on open access and web standards left a lasting legacy. worked on his Semantic Web standards
• Lawrence Lessig b. 1961
  Harvard Law professor and activist who founded Creative Commons and campaigns against political corruption. ally on open licensing
• Mark Zuckerberg b. 1984
  Co-founder of Facebook who built the world's largest social media platform and reshaped global communication. the centralisation he warns about