Tim Berners-Lee graduated from the Queen's College at Oxford University, England, with 1st class Honors in Physics in 1976.
He spent two years with Plessey Telecommunications Ltd a major UK Telecom equipment manufacturer, working on distributed transaction systems, message relays, and bar code technology.
In 1978 Tim left Plessey to join D.G Nash Ltd, where he wrote among other things typesetting software for intelligent printers, a multitasking operating system, and a generic macro expander.
A year and a half spent as an independent consultant included a six month stint as consultant software engineer at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. Whilst there, he wrote for his own private use his first program for storing information including using random associations. Named "Enquire", and never published, this program formed the conceptual basis for the future development of the World Wide Web.
From 1981 until 1984, Tim was a founding Director of Image Computer Systems Ltd, with technical design responsibility. In 1984, he took up a fellowship at CERN, to work on distributed real-time systems for scientific data acquisition and system control.
In 1989, he proposed a global hypertext project, to be known as the World Wide Web. Based on the earlier "Enquire" work, it was designed to allow people to work together by combining their knowledge in a web of hypertext documents. He wrote the first World Wide Web server and the first client, a wysiwyg hypertext browser/editor which ran in the NeXTStep environment. This work was started in October 1990, and the program "WorldWideWeb" first made available within CERN in December, and on the Internet at large in the summer of 1991.
Through 1991 and 1993, Tim continued working on the design of the Web, coordinating feedback from users across the Internet. His initial specifications of URIs, HTTP and HTML were refined and discussed in larger circles as the Web technology spread.
In 1994, Tim joined the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS)at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). as Director of the W3 Consortium which coordinates W3 development worldwide, with teams at MIT and at INRIA in France. The consortium takes as it goal to realize the full potential of the web, ensuring its stability through rapid evolution and revolutionary transformations of its usage.
In 1995, Tim Berners-Lee received the Kilby Foundation's "Young Innovator of the Year" Award for his invention of the World Wide Web, and was corecipient of the ACM Software Systems Award. He has been named as the recipient of the 1996 ACM Kobayashi award, and corecipient of the 1996 Computers and Communication (C&C) award.
He has honorary degrees from the Parsons School of Design, New York (D.F.A., 1996) and Southampton University (D.Sc., 1996), and is a Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society.
Tim is married to Nancy Carlson. They have two children, born 1991 and 1994.