Tim Berners-Lee

Tim Berners-Lee (born 1955) is a British computer scientist who, while working at the CERN physics lab in 1989, invented the World Wide Web. He then did something almost unheard of: he gave it away for free, so that anyone, anywhere could use it without paying a penny.

The headline achievement

People often muddle them up, but Berners-Lee is the reason we can talk about the internet versus the web at all. The internet is the network of cables and computers; the web is the world of linked pages that runs on top of it. He wrote the first web browser, the first web server, and the languages that still power it today — HTML for pages, HTTP for fetching them, and the URL for naming them. The very first website is still online.

Berners-Lee could have become fabulously rich by patenting the web, but he insisted it be royalty-free so it could spread to the whole planet. Decades later, at the 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony, he was carried into the stadium at a vintage computer and typed a message to billions of watching viewers: "This is for everyone." He has spent much of his life since campaigning to keep the web open and free for all.