Sir Timothy John “Tim” Berners-Lee, (born 8 June 1955, also known as “TimBL”), is a British physicist, computer scientist, and MIT professor credited with inventing the World Wide Web. On 25 December 1990, with the help of Robert Cailliau and a young student at CERN, he implemented the first successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and server via the Internet. This global system of hypertext documents, linked through the Internet, brought about a massive cultural shift ushered in by the new tech and content it made possible.
Berners-Lee is now director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which maintains standards for the Web and continues to refine its design. Recently he has envisioned a “Semantic Web” – an evolved version of the same system that recognizes the meaning of the information it carries. He is also a senior researcher at MIT’s Computer Science and AI Lab.
“It’s hard to overstate the impact of the global system he created. It’s almost Gutenbergian.” Time Magazine