Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Computer Scientist

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 14 December 2025

⏱️ 52 minutes

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Summary

Sir Tim Berners-Lee is a computer scientist and the inventor of the World Wide Web. He was born in 1955, a golden year for technology innovators. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were also born in the same year. A curious child, he learned about electronics from his train set and spent his pocket money on transistors. His first significant connecting invention was building an intercom as a teenager for the family home before moving on to build his first computer. His parents were both mathematicians and coders who met whilst building one of the first commercially available computers in the early nineteen fifties. Sir Tim came up with the idea of the World Wide Web whilst working at CERN and insisted that the technology be released to the world without commercial reward so that it would be free for everyone to use. He was knighted for his world changing invention and also appointed to the Order of Merit. In 2016 he was given the Turing Award. Sir Tim Berners-Lee divides his time between the US, the UK and Canada with his wife Rosemary, who is also a technology entrepreneur.

Presenter Lauren Laverne Producer Sarah Taylor

Desert Island Discs has cast many computer scientists away over the years including Dame Wendy Hall and Sir Demis Hassibis. You can hear their programmes if you search through BBC Sounds or our own Desert Island Discs website.

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts.
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0:40.6	Every week, I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury that they'd want to take with
0:45.7	them if they were cast away to a Desert Island. For rights reasons, the music's shorter than
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1:00.2	I hope you enjoy listening.
1:26.9	I'm going to... My castaway this week is the computer scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee,
1:28.8	inventor of the World Wide Web.
1:35.6	The scale of his achievement is hard to overstate. The Web has revolutionised everything from the global economy to politics,
1:43.7	changing how we live as individuals and societies. Perhaps he was born to do it. His mathematician parents met at work.
1:49.0	They were building one of the first computers, inspired by their contemporary friend Alan Turing.
1:58.2	Tim grew up fascinated by electronics, and although he studied physics at Oxford, he spent his free time building a computer from an old television set.
2:00.9	He moved to Switzerland to work at CERN,
2:02.5	and it was there in 1989 that he published the paper
	...

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