Tim Berners-Lee is the British computer scientist who invented the World Wide Web. According to his own page at the World Wide Web Consortium, he “invented the World Wide Web while at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory, in 1989.” He proposed the idea in a March 1989 document titled “Information Management: A Proposal,” which described a distributed hypertext system for sharing information across CERN’s many computers and people.
He did not stop at the idea. By 1990 he had built the first working version of the Web himself. His W3C page records that he “wrote the first web client and server in 1990,” and that his original specifications for URIs, HTTP, and HTML were refined over the following years as the Web spread. Those three pieces, a way to address documents (the URL), a way to fetch them (HTTP), and a way to write them (HTML), remain the foundation of the Web today.
In 1994 Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium, the standards body that guides the Web’s open technologies. He serves as its Founder and Emeritus Director. He chose to keep the Web open and royalty-free rather than patent it, a decision that allowed anyone to build on it.
His invention earned him the ACM A.M. Turing Award in 2017, given, in the citation’s words, “for inventing the World Wide Web, the first web browser, and the fundamental protocols and algorithms allowing the Web to scale.” He was knighted in 2004.