Berners-Lee, Tim

Background

Berners-Lee was born in London in 1955. His parents, Conway and Mary Berners-Lee, were mathematicians who met while helping to build England's first commercial computer, the Ferranti Mark 1, at Manchester University. Mathematics and computers were common household discussion topics; as a child, Berners-Lee once built a model computer out of cardboard. His parents were enthusiastic about their work, although they also knew well the limitations of machines; namely, computers were incapable of making random associations between objects and concepts the way that humans can. One day after school, Berners-Lee's father discussed this problem with him while preparing a speech for his boss to deliver. According to Weaving the Web, Conway Berners-Lee was struggling to think of ways to make computers [Page 25]intuitive. It was an important dilemma that would stick in his son's head.

Berners-Lee excelled in school, and graduated in 1976 with first-class honors in theoretical physics from Queen's College at the University of Oxford. While there, he made his first computer, using a soldering iron, an M6800 processor, and an old television set. After leaving Oxford, he worked for two years with a U.K. telecommunications company on distributed transaction systems and message relays, after which he worked at a company that produced typesetting software for printers. Eventually, he became an independent consultant, and in 1980, he found himself in Geneva, Switzerland, at the European Particle Physics Laboratory (CERN). While there on a six-month contract, Berners-Lee produced for his personal use the precursor to the World Wide Web, a program called Enquire. The name is short for “Enquire Within About Everything,” which was the name of a Victorian-era book on manners he'd once read. “I didn't use the book,” he told How the Web Was Born authors James Gilles and Robert Cailliau, “but that title stuck.”

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