Tim Berners-Lee and the Invention of the World Wide Web
Sir Timothy Berners-Lee (born 1955) is a British computer scientist widely credited with inventing the World Wide Web. In 1989, while working at CERN, the European physics laboratory in Switzerland, he proposed a system for managing and linking information across an organization's computers. Between 1990 and 1991 he built the first web browser and the first web server and published the world's first website, info.cern.ch.
The Web rests on three technologies Berners-Lee designed, which remain its foundation today. HTML (HyperText Markup Language) structures the content of web pages. The URL (Uniform Resource Locator) gives each resource a unique address. HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) defines how computers request and send those resources. Together with the hyperlink, a connection that lets one document reference another, these tools turned scattered files into an interconnected web of pages.
A crucial distinction is that the World Wide Web is not the same as the Internet. The Internet is the global network of interconnected computers: the underlying infrastructure of cables, routers, and communication signals that carry data between machines. The Web is a system of linked documents that runs on top of that infrastructure and is viewed through browsers. Berners-Lee did not invent the Internet, which already existed; his achievement was designing the Web that made the Internet broadly useful to ordinary people.
In 1993, Berners-Lee persuaded CERN to release the Web's technology for free, royalty-free, so that anyone could use or build on it without permission or payment. This open, non-proprietary approach removed barriers to adoption and is widely seen as a key reason the Web grew explosively rather than fragmenting into competing paid systems.
In 1994 Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to develop open standards that keep the Web interoperable. In later years he championed causes such as web privacy and open data, arguing that the Web should remain free and open to all. He was knighted by the Queen in recognition of his contribution to the modern world.
