8.

TIM BERNERS-LEE • 41

CHAPTER 8

TIM BERNERS-LEE
Inventer of the World Wide Web
42 • MASTERS OF DESIGN

I n less than two decades, the World Wide

Web has transformed the lives of millions
of people by giving us free and instant access
to online information. Designed by British
software engineer TIM BERNERS-LEE
(b. 1955), the web is a democratic medium
which is equally available to us all.
It is testimony to the power of the
World Wide Web that, less than two de-
cades after its invention, hundreds of mil-
lions of people all over the world could not
imagine their daily lives without it. Even if
they could, life without access to the web
would be less enjoyable and efficient. By giv-
ing us free and instant access to online in-
formation and enabling us to communicate
our ideas and knowledge to other people in This image portrays just how expansive the Web
is. Lines represent hyperlinks between Web pages.
the same instantly accessible way, the web
Spots where more lines converge represent larger
has also transformed the way that we think Web sites with many links. Colors represent the
and behave. site’s top-level domain: .com, .org, .edu, etc. This is
just a fraction of what exists on the Web today.
Ambitious Goals

The World Wide Web was designed by the British software engineer Tim Berners-Lee. Simply
constructing an online information network programmed to enable computers to replicate some of the
intuitive abilities of the human brain is a remarkable achievement in itself, but Berners-Lee went on to
ensure that his invention would be freely accessible to everyone and to eradicate the risk of the web being
controlled by commercial forces.
Determined to prevent this, Berners-Lee designed the web as a democratic medium in which every-
thing was equally accessible, regardless of size or quality. “The dream of the web is of a common informa-
tion space in which we communicate by sharing information,” he wrote. “Its universality is essential: the
fact that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global.” This is why the smallest
and least sophisticated websites are as easy to locate as the most expensive ones owned by powerful mul-
tinationals. In 1994, three years after the launch of the web, Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web
Consortium to regulate its future development and to protect its democratic spirit.
Born in London in 1955, Berners-Lee is the son of the mathematicians Conway Berners-Lee and
Mary Lee Woods, who worked on the development of the pioneering Manchester Mark 1 computer.
By the time he enrolled at Queens College, Oxford in 1973, Berners-Lee was a keen inventor and built
his first computer there with such makeshift materials as a soldering iron, an M6800 processor and an
 8. TIM BERNERS-LEE • 43

A screenshot of
WorldWebWeb, the first
Web browser for the
NeXTSTEP operating
system. The Web pages
displayed are from
http://info.cern.ch,
the first Web site ever
published. WordWide-
Web was built by Tim
Berners-Lee in 1991.

old television set. While at Oxford he and a friend were caught hacking and banned from using the
university computer.
After graduating in 1976, Berners-Lee worked for the telecommunications equipment manufac-
turer Plessey Telecommunications at Poole in Dorset and then worked for various companies as a free-
lance software engineer. One of his goals was to find a way of combining the processing power of the
computer with the intuitive qualities of the human brain. “There have always been things which people
are good at and things computers have been good at, and little overlap
between the two,” he wrote. “I was brought up to understand this dis-
“...the web has also
tinction in the 1950s and 1960s, and that intuition and understanding transformed the way
were human characteristics, and that computers worked mechanically
in tables and hierarchies.” that we think and
He set about developing a software programme to address this by
enabling computers to make – and to store – random associations be- behave.”
tween disparate pieces of information. Berners-Lee wrote the first such programme, Enquire – full name
Enquire-Within-Upon-Everything – in 1980 while working at CERN, the European Particle Physics
Laboratory in Geneva. Intended only for his private use, he never published Enquire, but continued to
develop similar programmes throughout the 1980s.

Birth of the Web

After returning to CERN in 1984, Berners-Lee was encouraged to continue his experiments by his
manager Mike Sendall, who ordered the software and hardware he needed to do so. CERN was then
44 • MASTERS OF DESIGN

This NeXTSTEP computer was

used to host the first Web server,
Web browser, and Web editor.
The note placed on the tower
reads, “this machine is a server,
do not power it down!!” The
computer is currently on display
in the Microcosm exhibition at
CERN.

the largest internet node in Europe, and Berners-Lee worked on ways of combining the internet and hy-
pertext. In 1989 he published a paper entitled Information Management: A Proposal and started work
on the development of the first web browser and editor. Named the World Wide Web, the result of his
research was a global hypertext project designed to enable people to work together by exchanging and
combining knowledge in a web of hypertext documents. By the end of 1990 Berners-Lee circulated his
work on the World Wide Web within CERN and then made it more widely available, together with the
first web server, named httpd, in the research and scientific communities. On 6 August 1991 the first
website went online at http://info.cern.ch. Designed by Berners-Lee, it explained what the World Wide
Web was, how to own a web browser and to set up a web server. From the start Berners-Lee made sure
that his work and the thinking behind it was freely accessible to as many people as possible.
For the next three years Berners-Lee and his colleagues re-
fined the design of the web and encouraged other people to use “Berners-Lee made sure
it. As more people learnt about his invention they aired their
own views on how it should evolve. From the beginning, Bern-
that his work and the
ers-Lee waived his right to patent his design or to earn royalties thinking behind it was
from its use thereby establishing the web as a non-commercial
medium. By 1994 the usage of http://info.cern.ch was a thou- freely accessible to as
sand times higher than three years before. At first Berners-Lee’s
fellow academics had used it, followed by early adopters in the many people as possible.”
information technology industry.
The growing popularity of the web intensified the threat of a powerful information technology
company finding a way to dominate it or of supplanting it with a commercial alternative. In September
1994 Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium to regulate its future. He described the
consortium, which is based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US with off-shoots at
INRIA in France and Keio University in Japan, as: “a neutral open forum where companies and organi-
 8. TIM BERNERS-LEE • 45

sations to whom the future of the web is important come to discuss and agree on common computer
protocols. It has been a centre for issue raising, design and decision by consensus.”
Now based at MIT in Boston as director of the World Wide Web Consortium, Tim Berners-Lee has
been able to safeguard the spirit of his original invention and to plan the next phase of the web’s develop-
ment which, he argues, will be even more exciting. “The great need for information about information,
to help us categorise, sort, pay for and own information is driving the design of languages for the web
designed for processing by machines, rather than people,” he observed. “The web of human-readable
document is being merged with a web of machine understandable data. The potential of the mixture of
humans and machines working together and communication through the web could be immense.”

Biography
1955 Tim Berners-Lee is born in London, the son of mathematicians who worked on the development of the
Manchester Mark 1 computer.
1973 Becomes a student at Queens College, Oxford, where he and a friend are caught by the authorities hack-
ing into the university computer.
1976 Joins Plessey Telecommunications at Poole in Dorset to develop distributed transaction systems, mes-
sage relays and bar code technology.

1978 Leaves Plessey for D. G. Nash at Ferndown in Dorset where he writes typesetting software for intelligent
printers and a multitask operating system.
1980 While working as a consultant software engineer at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in
Geneva, he designs Enquire, a software programme for his personal use to recognise and store random
associations of information.
1981 Joins Image Control Systems to develop real-time control firmware and graphics and communications
software.

Tim Berners-Lee next

to a computer display-
ing some of the earliest
Web sites in existance.
46 • MASTERS OF DESIGN

1984 Becomes a fellow at CERN to work on distributed real-time systems for scientific data acquisition and
system control.
1989 Begins the development of the World Wide Web, a global hypertext project, as well as of the first web
server and browser.
1990 The World Wide Web is made available to colleagues at CERN.

1991 Berners-Lee publishes his development work on the World Wide Web on the first website at http://info.
cern.ch as well as explaining how other people can use the web.
1992 Usage of the web spreads within the academic community.
1993 Early adopters in the information technology industry start to use the web.
1994 Berners-Lee founds the World Wide Web Consortium based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
in the US to regulate the development of the web by consensus.
1996 The consortium collaborates with Hakon Wium Lee to announce the Cascading Style Sheets standard,
which is adopted by popular browsers in 2000 and 2001.
1999 Time magazine names Tim Berners-Lee as one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century.
2000 Publication of Weaving the Web, Berners-Lee’s book on his invention.
2004 Tim Berners-Lee is knighted by H.M. Queen Elizabeth.

2005 Berners-Lee publishes the book Spinning the Semantic Web: Bringing the Worldwide Web to Its Full
Potential.
2007 Berners-Lee is awarded the Order of Merit.

Further Reading

• Berners-Lee, Tim, and Mark Fischetti. Weaving the Web: Origins and Future of the World Wide Web. Texere
Publishing, 2000.
• Caillau, Robert, and James Gillies. How the Web was Born: The Story of the World Wide Web. Oxford University
Press, 2000.
• Ann Gaines. Tim Berners-Lee and the Development of the World Wide Web, Mitchell Gaines Publishers, 2001.
• Stewart, Melissa. Tim Berners-Lee: Inventor of the World Wide Web. Ferguson Publishing Company, 2001.
• Berners-Lee, Tim. The Unfinished Revolution: How to Make Technology Work for Us Instead of the Other Way
Around. HarperCollins, 2002.
• Berners-Lee, Tim. Spinning the Semantic Web: Bringing the Worldwide Web to Its Full Potential. The MIT Press,
2005.

Visit the World Wide Web Consortium’s website at http://www.w3.org/ and read Tim Berners-Lee’s account of the
web’s development at http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/ShortHistory.

For more information on British design and architecture, visit Design in Britain, the online archive run in collaboration
by the Design Museum and the British Council, at http://www.designmuseum.org/designinbritain.