Berners-Lee was born in London, England, and attended Emanuel School in Wandsworth. He is an alumnus of the Queen's College of Oxford University, where he built a computer with a soldering iron, TTL gates, an M6800 processor and an old television. It was also at Oxford where he was caught hacking with a friend and was subsequently banned from using the university computer.

He worked at Plessey Telecommunications Limited in 1976 as a programmer, and in 1978 he worked at D.G Nash Limited where he worked on typesetting software and an operating system.

In 1994, Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It comprised various companies willing to create standards and recommendations to improve the quality of the Internet.

Many of the World Wide Web Consortium's achievements are able to be seen in many websites on the Internet. In 1996, in conjunction with Håkon Wium Lie, the W3C announced a standard entitled Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). It was not until 2000 and 2001 that popular browsers began to support this standard, which shows Berners-Lee's first goal to maintain the freedom of the Web.

To this day, Berners-Lee maintains a low profile, not intent on gaining popular status.

In December 2004 he accepted a chair (professorship) in Computer Science at the School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, UK. He will be working closely with the University on the Semantic Web — his new project

Spinning the Semantic Web: Bringing the World Wide Web to Its Full Potential Tim Berners-Lee (Foreword), Dieter Fensel (Editor), James Hendler (Editor), Henry Lieberman (Editor), Wolfgang Wahlster (Editor) (The MIT Press, 2005) ISBN 026256212X