home | homework | links | glossary | sitemap | contact
Homework Page
Homework Week 4
Tim Berners-Lee
Tim Berners-Lee is the inventor of the World Wide Web. He was born June 8, 1955 in London and majored in physics at Oxford. He built his own computer from spare parts and also got in trouble for hacking the computer at Oxford. He graduated in 1976 and in 1980 he became a software engineer and consultant at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. CERN is the European Organization for Nuclear Research. While there he made a program called Enquire that allowed him to keep track of various projects for CERN. It was never made available to the public.
He left CERN for a time then returned in 1984. In 1989 he envisioned a global hypertext project that would allow people to work together and share their knowledge through a system of hypertext documents. It was based on his earlier Enquire program. His WorldWideWeb program was used at CERN in 1990 then made available to the internet in 1991. With feedback from users around the world he made specifications for URLs, HTTP and HTML and refined them.
In 1994 he founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They set standards for the World Wide Web and also suggested that it be based on royalty-free technology so anyone could easily use it.
He has won numerous awards and is now working with the UK government to make data more accessible on the Web. He is also a director of the World Wide Web Foundation.