Tim Berners-Lee. View of Tim Berners-Lee, British computer scientist and principal developer of the World Wide Web (WWW, or Web). Berners-Lee studied at Oxford University, England. While working at CERN, Switzerland, he developed the Web, a global network for information sharing based on hyper- text documents: text documents which have other data, such as images or links to other computers, embedded in them. The Web started in 1989, and now links thousands of host computers through the Internet. Berners-Lee left CERN in 1994, and joined MIT, in Massachusetts, USA. He also directs the W3 Consortium, a forum dedicated to realising the Web's full potential. Photographed in 1999.