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(born June 8, 1955, London, Eng.) British physicist. The son of computer scientists, he graduated from Oxford University and in 1980 accepted a fellowship at CERN in Geneva. In 1989 he suggested a global hypertext project. He and his CERN colleagues created a communications protocol called HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) that standardized communication between computer servers and clients. Their text-based Web browser was released to the public in 1991, marking the beginnings of the World Wide Web and general public use of the Internet. Berners-Lee declined all opportunities to profit from his immensely valuable innovation. In 1994 he joined MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science as director of the World Wide Web Consortium. His numerous honours include the inaugural Millennium Technology Prize (2004) and the Charles Stark Draper Prize (2007). He was knighted in 2004.