Sir Tim Berners-Lee

Digital Library

ACM Fellows

United Kingdom - 2023

citation

For inventing the World Wide Web, the first web browser, and the fundamental protocols and algorithms allowing the Web to scale

Press Release

ACM A. M. Turing Award

United Kingdom - 2016

READ FULL CITATION AND ESSAY

citation

For inventing the World Wide Web, the first web browser, and the fundamental protocols and algorithms allowing the Web to scale.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989, envisioning a global information space where documents and other web resources could be identified with uniform names, where documents and resources could be retrieved in a standard way, and where documents could be connected by hypertext links. To this end, Sir Tim introduced a universal resource naming scheme based on URIs and URLs; the HTTP protocol for sending and receiving information across the Internet in a scalable and decentralized way; and the HTML markup language, which provided a standard way for documents to be created and displayed in a device-independent manner and linked to other documents. In addition, Sir Tim created the first web browser and web serving software, and he did so in an open-source fashion that catalyzed the Web's further development.

While all know the World Wide Web as having had enormous societal impact, this ACM Turing Award also recognizes the Web as a contribution of lasting and major technical importance to the computing community, due to its simplicity, elegance, and extensibility. While Sir Tim could have assembled more complex technologies with additional features, his design was an elegant solution that enabled enormous capability, both initially and over time:

  • Sir Tim recognized that simplicity was needed for widespread adoption (particularly in the scientific community he served). His protocol simplifications (including his insistence on statelessness) made the design easy to implement; his use of human-readable scripting made the system comprehensible and easy to debug.
  • Sir Tim built HTML into the Web, recognizing that this would make data comprehensible and useful to anyone trying to publish information.
  • Sir Tim's initial browser and early web server made the system immediately useful.
  • Sir Tim furthered widespread adoption of the Web by freely distributing a software package and creating an open-source community that enabled many others to use and refine the technology.

The Web design is described in an early Communications of the ACM paper ("The World Wide Web," Aug. 1994, Volume 37, No. 8, pp. 76-82), where Sir Tim described his vision for the Web, as well as the technical underpinnings to make that vision a reality.

Sir Tim's contributions to the Web go far beyond the creation of the original code. He created and shaped the World Wide Web Consortium, which has developed the standards that are so crucial to Web development and use. He was also a founder of the Web Science Trust, a British charitable trust devoted to the interdisciplinary study of the Web and its effect on society, and the World Wide Web Foundation, which works to establish the open web as a public good and a basic right. Sir Tim continues to extend his original invention and is a passionate advocate for adding semantic annotation to the web.

In short, the Web is what it is today because of Sir Tim's brilliant design, based on his synthesis of several key ideas and his technical leadership. The ACM recognizes Sir Tim with the Turing Award for this enduring contribution to the computing community.

Press Release

ACM Software System Award

USA - 1995

World-Wide Web

citation

Tim Berners-Lee, Robert Cailliau

For developing a network-oriented hypermedia system capable of operating over the global internet.

ACM Names 68 Fellows for Contributions to Computing That Underpin Our Daily Lives

ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, has named 68 Fellows for transformative contributions to computing science and technology. All the 2023 inductees are longstanding ACM Members who were selected by their peers for groundbreaking innovations that have improved how we live, work, and play.

“The announcement each year that a new class of ACM Fellows has been selected is met with great excitement,” said ACM President Yannis Ioannidis. “ACM is proud to include nearly 110,000 computing professionals in our ranks and ACM Fellows represent just 1% of our entire global membership. This year’s inductees include the inventor of the World Wide Web,the “godfathers of AI, and other colleagues whose contributions have all been important building blocks in forming the digital society that shapes our modern world.

In keeping with ACM’s global reach, the 2023 Fellows represent universities, corporations, and research centers in Canada, China, Germany, India, Israel, Norway, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The contributions of the 2023 Fellows run the gamut of the computing field―including algorithm design, computer graphics, cybersecurity, energy-efficient computing, mobile computing, software analytics, and web search, to name a few.

Additional information about the 2023 ACM Fellows, as well as previously named ACM Fellows, is available through the ACM Fellows website.

Read the news release.

2016 ACM A.M. Turing Award

ACM named Sir Tim Berners-Lee, a Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Oxford, the recipient of the 2016 ACM A.M. Turing Award. Berners-Lee was cited for inventing the World Wide Web, the first web browser, and the fundamental protocols and algorithms allowing the Web to scale. Considered one of the most influential computing innovations in history, the World Wide Web is the primary tool used by billions of people every day to communicate, access information, engage in commerce, and perform many other important activities.

The ACM Turing Award, often referred to as the “Nobel Prize of Computing,” carries a $1 million prize, with financial support provided by Google, Inc. It is named for Alan M. Turing, the British mathematician who articulated the mathematical foundation and limits of computing.

“The first-ever World Wide Web site went online in 1991,” said ACM President Vicki L. Hanson. “Although this doesn’t seem that long ago, it is hard to imagine the world before Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s invention. In many ways, the colossal impact of the World Wide Web is obvious. Many people, however, may not fully appreciate the underlying technical contributions that make the Web possible. Sir Tim Berners-Lee not only developed the key components, such as URIs and web browsers that allow us to use the Web, but offered a coherent vision of how each of these elements would work together as part of an integrated whole.”

“The Web has radically changed the way we share ideas and information and is a key factor for global economic growth and opportunity,” said Andrei Broder, Google Distinguished Scientist. “The idea of a web of knowledge originated in a brilliant 1945 essay by Vannevar Bush. Over the next decades, several pieces of the puzzle came together: hypertext, the Internet, personal computing. But the explosive growth of the Web started when Tim Berners-Lee proposed a unified user interface to all types of information supported by a new transport protocol. This was a significant inflection point, setting the stage for everyone in the world, from high schoolers to corporations, to independently build their Web presences and collectively create the wonderful World Wide Web.”

Development of the World Wide Web
Berners-Lee, who graduated from Oxford University with a degree in Physics, submitted the proposal for the World Wide Web in 1989 while working at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. He noticed that scientists were having difficulty sharing information about particle accelerators. In 1989, interconnectivity among computers via Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) had been in existence for a decade, and while segments of the scientific community were using the Internet, the kinds of information they could easily share was limited. Berners-Lee envisioned a system where CERN staff could exchange documents over the Internet using readable text that contained embedded hyperlinks.

To make his proposed information-sharing system work, Berners-Lee invented several integrated tools that would underpin the World Wide Web, including:

  • Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) that would serve to allow any object (such as a document or image) on the Internet to be named, and thus identified
  • Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) that allows for the exchange, retrieval, or transfer of an object over the Internet
  • Web browser, a software application that retrieves and renders resources on the World Wide Web along with clickable links to other resources, and, in the original version, allowed users to modify webpages and make new links
  • Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) that allows web browsers to translate documents or other resources and render them as multimedia webpages

Berners-Lee launched the world’s first website, http://info.cern.ch, on August 6, 1991.

Central to the universal adoption of the World Wide Web was Berners-Lee’s decision to develop it as open and royalty-free software. Berners-Lee released his libwww software package in the early 1990s, granting the rights to anyone to study, change, or distribute the software in any way they chose. He then continued to guide the project and worked with developers around the world to develop web-server code. The popularity of the open source software, in turn, led to the evolution of early web browsers, including Mosaic, that are credited with propagating the Web beyond academic and government research settings and making it a global phenomenon.

By 1994, the number of websites had grown to nearly 3,000, and today, there are more than 1 billion websites online.

ACM will present the 2016 ACM A.M. Turing Award at its annual Awards Banquet on June 24, 2017 in San Francisco, California.

Background

Berners-Lee is a graduate of Oxford University, where he received a first-class Bachelor of Arts degree in Physics. Berners-Lee is the 3Com Founders Professor of Engineering in the School of Engineering with a joint appointment in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he also heads the Decentralized Information Group (DIG). He is also a Fellow at Christ Church and a Professorial Research Fellow at the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford.

Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in 1994, where he continues to serve as Director. W3C is an international community that develops open standards to ensure the interoperability and long-term growth of the Web. In 2009, he established the Word Wide Web Foundation, which works to advance the Open Web as a public good and a basic human right. He is the President of the Open Data Institute (ODI) in London.

He has received many awards and honors, including the ACM Software System Award in 1995. Berners-Lee was knighted in 2004 and received the Order of Merit in 2007, becoming one of only 24 living members entitled to hold the honor. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, and has received honorary degrees from a number of universities around the world, including Manchester, Harvard, and Yale. TIME magazine included him as one of the 100 Most Important People of the 20th Century.