"We are forming cells within a global brain, a place where the whim of a human being and the reasoning of a machine coexist." - Time Berners-Lee

Tim Berners-Lee was born in London on June 8, 1955.

In 1976 Berners-Lee graduated from Queen’s College at Oxford. From there he went to work for Cern, the European Particle Physics Laboratory, as a computer software consultant. While at Cern he wrote a computer program entitled Enquire Within Upon Everything this “minor” program was the precursor to the World Wide Web (not to be confused with the Internet) which he proposed as a global hypertext project in 1989. In his own words his vision of the WWW was “the universe of accessible information. the point about it being a universe is that there is one space.” (online). He states that he began working with hypertext to keep himself organized, that there were no computer programs that would really let him make random association between absolutely anything and absolutely anything, are always constrained.” (online). To this day Berners-Lee fights hard to keep the WWW open, nonproprietary and free.

Prior to going to Cern he was a founding director of Image Computer Systems, and before that a principal engineer with Plessey Telecommunications, in Poole, England.

In 1994 Berners-Lee joined M.I.T. to direct the W3 consortium which coordinates W3 development. According to Berners-Lee the reasons for the development of W3C are for “Growth of web protocols, Threat of fragmentation, Need for new features, Need for neutral party. There are 150 companies involved in W3C and three host institutes (MIT, USA; INRIA, France; Keio University, Japan). Its technical areas of study are User Interface, Technology and Society, and Web Architecture. Future challenges may include: Intellectual Property rights, Distribution of information, and Agents.

In 1996 Berners-Lee was awarded a distinguished Fellowship of the British Computer Society.

Timeline

1980 CERN

1991 first web browser on NeXT

1992 Unix browser

1993 PC Mosaic

1994 W3C

1998 XML 1.0

1999 Genius Grant

Books Written

1999 Weaving the Web