Historical Figure
Tim Berners-Lee
b. 1955
English computer scientist (born 1955)
Hear Their Voice
Original recordings and AI voice
"TED Talk on the Next Web" — February 13, 2009
Generated by Today in History
Talk to Tim Berners-Lee
Have a conversation with this historical figure through AI
Key Dates
Birth
1955 June 8, 1955 →Biography
Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee, also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web, HTML, the URL system, and HTTP. He is a professorial research fellow at the University of Oxford and a professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Timeline
Tim Berners-Lee submits his proposal to CERN for an information management system, which subsequently develops into the World Wide Web.
March 12 →Tim Berners-Lee, informaticien au Conseil européen pour la recherche nucléaire (CERN) propose un système hypertexte distribué sur le réseau informatique interne et qui deviendra le World Wide Web.
March 13 →Einen Tag nach Tim Berners-Lees und Robert Cailliaus Konzept für ein weltweites Hypertext-Projekt wird die erste Webseite veröffentlicht.
November 13 →en el CERN, el científico británico Tim Berners-Lee presenta el navegador para Internet.
February 26 →Tim Berners-Lee releases files describing his idea for the World Wide Web. WWW debuts as a publicly available service on the Internet.
August 6 →The World Wide Web (WWW, W3) is an information system of interlinked hypertext documents that are accessed via the Internet. It has also commonly become known simply as the Web. Individual document pages on the World Wide Web are called web pages and are accessed with a software application running on the user's computer, commonly called a web browser. Web pages may contain text, images, videos, and other multimedia components, as well as web navigation features consisting of hyperlinks. Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist and former CERN employee, is considered the inventor of the Web. On 12 March 1989, Berners-Lee wrote a proposal for what would eventually become the World Wide Web. The 1989 proposal was meant for a more effective CERN communication system but Berners-Lee eventually realised the concept could be implemented throughout the world. Berners-Lee and Belgian computer scientist Robert Cailliau proposed in 1990 to use hypertext "to link and access information of various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will", and Berners-Lee finished the first website in December of that year. The first test was completed around 20 December 1990 and Berners-Lee reported about the project on the newsgroup alt.hypertext on 7 August 1991. The World Wide Web had a number of differences from other hypertext systems available at the time. The Web required only unidirectional links rather than bidirectional ones, making it possible for someone to link to another resource without action by the owner of that resource. It also significantly reduced the difficulty of implementing web servers and browsers (in comparison to earlier systems), but in turn presented the chronic problem of link rot. Unlike predecessors such as HyperCard, the World Wide Web was non-proprietary, making it possible to develop servers and clients independently and to add extensions without licensing restrictions. On 30 April 1993, CERN announced that the World Wide Web would be free to anyone, with no fees due. Coming two months after the announcement that the server implementation of the Gopher protocol was no longer free to use, this produced a rapid shift away from Gopher and towards the Web. An early popular web browser was ViolaWWW for Unix and the X Windowing System.
April 30 →More from the Postwar
Explore what happened on the days that shaped Tim Berners-Lee's life. Today In History connects historical figures with the events, births, and deaths that defined their era. Browse all historical figures or explore today's events.