Sir Tim Berners-Lee

History of the World Wide Web

Building Industries on the Web

Electronic Commerce

Creativity in Cyberspace

Future of the Internet

Sir Tim Berners-Lee is the inventor of the World Wide Web.

In 1989, he proposed a global hypertext project, to be known as the World Wide Web. Based on the earlier "Enquire" work, it was designed to allow people to work together by combining their knowledge in a web of hypertext documents. He wrote the first World Wide Web server, "httpd", and the first client, "WorldWideWeb" a what-you-see-is-what-you-get hypertext browser/editor which ran in the NeXTStep environment. This work was started in October 1990, and the program "WorldWideWeb" first made available within CERN in December, and on the Internet at large in the summer of 1991.

In 1994, Tim founded the World Wide Web Consortium at the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Since that time he has served as the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium which coordinates Web development worldwide, with teams at MIT, at ERCIM in Europe, and at Keio University in Japan. The Consortium takes as its goal to lead the Web to its full potential, ensuring its stability through rapid evolution and revolutionary transformations of its usage.

In 1999, he became the first holder of the 3Com Founders chair at LCS which merged with the Artificial Intelligence Lab to become "CSAIL", the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He is the 3COM Founders Professor of Engineering in the School of Engineering, with a joint appointment in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at CSAILwhere he also heads the Decentralized Information Group (DIG). In December 2004 he was named a Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Southampton, UK at which he holds a Chair. He is co-Director of the new Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI) launched in 2006.

He is the author of "Weaving the Web", on the the past, present and future of the Web. He is also a Director of the World Wide Web Foundation, started in 2008 to fund and coordinate efforts to further the potential of the Web to benefit humanity.