Tim Berners-Lee was born in London in 1955, both his parents were computer scientists and mathematicians (so it’s not surprising he followed a similar path). As a child he was a keen trainspotter (very geeky) and learnt electronics from tinkering with his model railway.

After leaving school he studied physics at Queen’s College, Oxford - while there he made a computer out of an old television set.

After graduating in 1976 he stayed in the UK, working as an engineer at a telecommunications company. In 1980 Berners-Lee moved to Geneva for six months to work as an independent contractor of CERN. He returned to the UK to work for a computer company, gaining greater experience in computer networking before returning to CERN three years later as a Fellow. This is when Berners-Lee began to envision and put forward the proposal for the world wide web. Initially conceived and developed to meet the demand for automated information-sharing between scientists in universities and institutes around the world, including CERN. The basic idea of the WWW was to merge the evolving technologies of computers, data networks and hypertext into a powerful and easy to use global information system.

Berners-Lee wrote his proposal in March 1989, and in 1990, redistributed it. His manager at the time, Mike Sendall, called his proposals "vague, but exciting".

The first website at CERN – and in the world – was dedicated to the World Wide Web project itself and was hosted on Berners-Lee's computer.

The first Web server in the US came online in December 1991, once again in a particle physics laboratory: the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in California.

On 30 April 1993, CERN put the World Wide Web software in the public domain. Later, CERN made a release available with an open licence, an effective way to maximise its dissemination. These actions allowed the web to flourish, thus the 1990s was the beginning of the dot.com boom!  This is the decade when well known brand names established themselves, players like Amazon, Google and our very own Trade Me!

As of 2023, around 95.9% of New Zealanders use the internet regularly. It’s fair to say we take the world wide web very much for granted these days - a pretty staggering result for something that’s only 31 years old!

As mentioned at the beginning of the blog, Tim Berners-Lee is the namesake of one of our meeting rooms at Basestation. This meeting room is located on the ground floor and can accommodate 12 people boardroom style. For more information about all our meeting rooms including rates and how to book, please click here.