Inventor of the World Wide Web.

A graduate of Oxford University, Berners-Lee took a temporary job as a consultant software engineer at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1980. Whilst there he wrote a computer program for information storage called Enquire. This formed the conceptual basis for the future development of the World Wide Web.

In 1989, while working at CERN again, Berners-Lee had his big idea. He proposed a program designed to allow researchers to work together by sharing and updating information. The prototype program, WorldWideWeb, was made available on the Internet in the summer of 1991. It formed the foundation of the World Wide Web, a global information space where information stored on computers is linked and available to anyone anywhere.

Berners-Lee now holds the 3Com Founders chair at the Laboratory for Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also director of the World Wide Web Consortium, an open forum of companies and organisations with the mission of leading the Web to its full potential.