Sir Timothy John "Tim" Berners-Lee, OM, KBE, FRS, FREng, FRSA, DFBCS (born 8 June 1955),[1] also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist, best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. He made a proposal for an information management system in March 1989,[2] and he implemented the first successful communication between aHypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and server via the Internet sometime around mid-November of that same year.[3][4][5][6][7]
Berners-Lee is the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which oversees the Web's continued development. He is also the founder of the World Wide Web Foundation, and is a senior researcher and holder of theFounders Chair at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).[8] He is a director of theWeb Science Research Initiative (WSRI),[9] and a member of the advisory board of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence.[10][11]
In 2004, Berners-Lee was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his pioneering work.[12][13] In April 2009, he was elected a foreign associate of the United States National Academy of Sciences.[14][15] He was honoured as the "Inventor of the World Wide Web" during the 2012 Summer Olympics opening ceremony, in which he appeared in person, working with a vintage NeXT Computer at the London Olympic Stadium.[16] He tweeted "This is for everyone",[17] which instantly was spelled out in LCD lights attached to the chairs of the 80,000 people in the audience.[16]
