Tim Berners-Lee

Tim Berners-Lee is a British computer scientist who invented the World Wide Web while working at the CERN particle physics laboratory in Switzerland. In 1989 he proposed a system for linking documents across different computers using hypertext, and over 1990 and 1991 he implemented the three technologies that made the web function, HTML for formatting documents, HTTP for transferring them, and URLs for addressing them, along with writing the first web browser and the first web server. Berners-Lee deliberately made the underlying technology available royalty-free, a decision widely credited with allowing the web to spread rapidly rather than remaining a proprietary system controlled by any single organization. He went on to found the World Wide Web Consortium in 1994 to guide the web's continued technical development, and he received the Turing Award in 2016 for inventing the World Wide Web, the first web browser and the fundamental protocols and algorithms allowing the web to scale.