Tim Berners-Lee was born in Britain in 1955. He received a degree in physics from Oxford University. Having constructed his first makeshift computer already while he was at university, he entered professional life as a software engineer.

In 1989, with the Internet established as a powerful academic network, Berners-Lee served in the computing services section of CERN. He sought ways to enhance information management within the organization and among other particle physics institutes located around the world. It was for this purpose that he first proposed the groundbreaking idea of running hypertext globally.

"The original idea of the Web was that it should be a collaborative space where by writing something together, and as people worked on it, they could iron out misunderstanding."

Berners-Lee's breakthrough was to marry hypertext to the Internet. The Web was first made available to the public in 1991.

Tim Berners-Lee has been Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) since it was founded in 1994. He is also a Senior Researcher at MIT's CSAIL where he leads the Decentralized Information Group (DIG), and Professor of Computer Science at Southampton ECS.

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