Tim Berners-Lee conceived of and developed the world wide web with help from Robert Cailliau at CERN.

Tim Berners-Lee's mother and father were both mathematicians who were part of the team that programmed Manchester University's Mark I, the world's first commercial, stored program computer, sold by Feranti Ltd. One day when he was in high school Berners-Lee found his dad writing a speech on computers for Basil de Ferranti. Father and son talked about how the human brain has a unique advantage over computers, since it can connect concepts that aren't already associated. For example, if you are walking and see a nice tree, you might think about how cool the park is under the trees, and then think of your backyard, and then decide to plant a tree for shade behind your house. Young Berners-Lee was left with a powerful impression of the potential for computers to be able to link any two pieces of previously unrelated information.

In 1980 Mr. Berners-Lee landed a temporary contract job as a software consultant at CERN ( the famous European Particle physics Laboratory in Geneva). He wrote a program, called Enquire, which he called a "memory substitute," for his personal use to help him remember connections between various people and projects at the lab.

He envisioned a global information space where information stored on computers everywhere was linked and available to anyone anywhere. There were two technologies already developed that would allow his vision to become reality.

In 1945, Vannevar Bush wrote an article entitled, "As We May Think," in which he described a theoretical system for storing information based on associations.

The other technology was the Internet—a computer network of networks. The Internet is a very general infrastructure that allows computers to link together . It uses standardized protocols (TCP/IP) which let computers of different types using different software communicate. Hypertext would allow any document in the information space to be linked to any other document. The Internet would allow those documents to be transmitted.

In 1989, Berners-Lee submitted a proposal at CERN to develop an information system that would create a web of information. Initially, his proposal received no reply, but he began working on his idea anyway. In 1990, he wrote the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)—the language computers would use to communicate hypertext documents over the Internet and designed a scheme to give documents addresses on the Internet. Berners-Lee called this address a Universal Resource Identifier (URI). (This is now usually known as a URL—Uniform Resource Locator.) By the end of the year he had also written a client program (browser) to retrieve and view hypertext documents. He called this client "WorldWideWeb."

He also wrote the first web server. A web server is the software that stores web pages on a computer and makes them available to be accessed by others. Berners-Lee set up the first web server known as "info.cern.ch." at CERN.

In 1991, he made his WorldWideWeb browser and web server software available on the Internet and posted notices to several newsgroups including alt.hypertext. The Web began to take off as computer enthusiasts around the world began setting up their own web servers. Often the owners of the new sites would email Berners-Lee and he would link to their sites from the CERN site. His dream of a global information space was finally happening.

Tim is married to Nancy Carlson. They have two children, born 1991 and 1994.

The above biography is from the Internet re: Berners-Lee.


For information about Tim's affirmation of Unitarian Universalist faith, see his autobiography, Weaving the Web, pages 207-209. There he says, in part:

One of the things I like about Unitarianism is its lack of religious trappings, miracles, pomp and circumstance. For me, who enjoyed the acceptance and the diverse community of the Internet, the Unitarian church was a great fit.

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"Sir Tim Berners-Lee: He created the Web. Now he's making Internet 2.0."
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