Tim studied Physics at Queen's College, Oxford University, graduating in 1976. Not long after graduating, he became an independent consultant, and in 1980 spent six months as a software engineer at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research ("CERN") in Geneva. At this time, he devised a system for storing information linked together by random associations, inspired by the workings of the human brain.

Tim's great intuition was to see the potential for hypertext links to connect documents stored on computers anywhere in the world. These documents could then be transmitted over the internet. Returning to CERN as a fellow in 1984,he began to develop this idea into what would become the World Wide Web, and in 1989 he wrote a proposal for a global hypertext project. He wrote the language which would be used to allow different computers to transmit their documents, the Hypertext Transfer Protocol ("HTTP"),and the first Web client, a hypertext browser/editor called WorldWideWeb. He also developed Hypertext Markup Language ("HTML"), the code used to describe how text should appear on a Web page.

The WorldWideWeb browser first became available to the general public over the internet in 1991. In 1994, Tim established the World Wide Web Consortium, an organisation which coordinates Web development, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ("MIT"). One of Tim's latest projects has been the Semantic Web, which he hopes will once again revolutionise the way information is stored and shared by allowing computers to assess these mantic meaning of keywords in Web pages.

Tim Berners-Lee is not just the inventor of the Web; he remains actively involved in its development. He is a true Web Icon.