Person

Tim Berners-Lee

Tim Berners-Lee is a British computer scientist who proposed and implemented the World Wide Web while working at CERN.

Period
1955–present
Known for
World Wide Web
Historical contribution

What Berners-Lee contributed

His 1989 and 1990 proposals joined hypertext with Internet networking. He implemented the first Web server, browser-editor and website, and helped define URLs, HTTP and HTML as a practical publishing system.

Why it mattered

The Web made distributed documents easier to publish, address and connect, turning the Internet into a broadly usable information space.

Connected topics

Where this fits in ITEM

Evidence

Sources and further reading

  1. Information Management: A Proposal, CERN, March 1989

    Tim Berners-Lee · 1989

    Open source ↗

  2. WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a HyperText Project, CERN, November 1990

    Tim Berners-Lee, Robert Cailliau · 1990

    Open source ↗

  3. WorldWideWeb, the first Web client, W3C

    Tim Berners-Lee

    Open source ↗

  4. Licensing the Web: public releases of Web software, including the 30 April 1993 statement

    CERN · 1993

    Open source ↗

  5. RFC 1630: Universal Resource Identifiers in WWW, June 1994

    Tim Berners-Lee · 1994

    Open source ↗

  6. RFC 1866: Hypertext Markup Language 2.0, November 1995

    Tim Berners-Lee, Dan Connolly · 1995

    Open source ↗

  7. Roy Fielding and Henrik Frystyk, RFC 1945: HTTP/1.0, May 1996

    Tim Berners-Lee · 1996

    Open source ↗

  8. The World Wide Web: A Very Short Personal History, 1998

    Tim Berners-Lee · 1998

    Open source ↗