Computer science

Tim Berners-Lee: inventions and patents

Tim Berners-Lee, born in London, proposed the World Wide Web at CERN in March 1989 and wrote the first web client and server in 1990. He says his colleague Robert Cailliau pushed CERN's management to give the WWW technology away without royalties, which took 18 months and a lot of nagging at the directorate level. He founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in 1994. This record lists no patent for the Web.^1,2,3

Inventions

• World Wide Web, 1989. A hypertext system for sharing information over the internet. The original proposal dates from March 1989 and coding began in September 1990.^1,2

Recognition

• 2004 Knighthood²
• 2016 ACM A.M. Turing Award (listed by ACM as the 2016 award, and dated 4 April 2017 on his W3C page)^3,2

Sources

1. World Wide Web Consortium, Frequently asked questions by the Press, Tim BL (accessed 2026-10-27)
2. World Wide Web Consortium, Tim Berners-Lee (accessed 2026-10-27)
3. Association for Computing Machinery, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, A.M. Turing Award laureate (accessed 2026-10-27)