Tim Berners-Lee: Inventor of the World Wide Web

Sir Tim Berners-Lee (b.1955), English computer scientist, invented the initial software for the World-Wide Web. The son of computer scientists, he graduated from Oxford University and in 1980 accepted a fellowship at CERN (the European nuclear research establishment) in Geneva, Switzerland. In 1989 he suggested a global hypertext project. He and his CERN colleagues created a communications protocol called HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) that standardized communication between computer servers and clients. Their text-based Web browser was released to the public in 1991, marking the beginnings of the World Wide Web and general public use of the Internet. Berners-Lee declined all opportunities to profit from his immensely valuable innovation. Knighted in 2004, he lives in Massachusetts and is currently working on development of the Semantic Web and advocacy of royalty-free technology.