Tim Berners-Lee Trivia
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49 free Tim Berners-Lee trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
Tim Berners-Lee gave away the most valuable invention of the late twentieth century. He wrote the proposal for the World Wide Web at CERN in March 1989, built the first browser and server on a NeXT computer, published the first website in December 1990, and then persuaded CERN to release the whole thing royalty-free so anyone could use it. He has spent the decades since defending that openness, from net neutrality to his Solid project for personal data. This Tim Berners-Lee trivia quiz runs 49 questions across his life and work: his mathematician parents and the Ferranti Mark 1, the computer he built from a television at Oxford, ENQUIRE, the "vague, but exciting" note from his boss, Robert Cailliau, WorldWideWeb and CERN httpd, the founding of the W3C, the double-slash apology, the 2012 Olympics tweet, his knighthood, Order of Merit and Turing Award, the Sotheby's NFT auction and his 2025 memoir. Easy questions come first; the final third is for people who know what a Line Mode browser is. Every answer is verified against Wikipedia's articles on Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web, with the supporting sentence quoted under each question. If you enjoy this quiz, try our internet history and computer science quizzes next.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which language did Berners-Lee create for writing web pages?
HTML
HTML was one of three pieces he specified for the first Web, along with web addresses and the HTTP protocol, all running on top of an Internet he did not invent.
Q 02Berners-Lee invented the Web at CERN, a research laboratory near which Swiss city?
Geneva
Geneva's laboratory first took to the Web for something mundane: its first popular use there was looking up numbers in the staff telephone directory.
Q 03In 2014 Berners-Lee called for a Web bill of rights, likening it to which historic document?
Magna Carta
Magna Carta was his shorthand for a global charter protecting an open, neutral Web; he made the call 25 years to the day after writing his first proposal for it.
Q 04How did Berners-Lee's manager Mike Sendall describe the Web proposal?
"Vague, but exciting"
"Vague, but exciting" is what Sendall wrote on the proposal, which never used the words World Wide Web: at that stage the only name its author had for the system was "Mesh".
Q 05Berners-Lee was born in 1955 in which city?
London
London was where his parents had settled after meeting among the programmers of a pioneering computer; he grew up in the south-west of the city and says they taught him that maths is fun.
Q 06Berners-Lee's parents both worked on which pioneering British computer?
Ferranti Mark 1
Ferranti Mark 1 programmer Mary Lee Woods led a successful campaign for equal pay for the women on its team; Conway Berners-Lee joined the firm in 1953 and they married a year later.
Q 07As a child Berners-Lee learnt about electronics by tinkering with what?
A model railway
A model railway filled his bedroom; he built electronic gadgets to control the trains and, by his own account, ended up more interested in the electronics than the trains.
Q 08Berners-Lee took a first-class degree in which subject at Oxford in 1976?
Physics
Physics appealed to him as a compromise between maths and electronics, theory and practice; he has said it turned out to be something special and wonderful in itself.
Q 09While at Oxford, Berners-Lee made a computer out of what?
An old television set
An old television set cost him £5 at a repair shop down the road; he wired it to a processor with a soldering iron to make his first computer.
Q 10As a teenager Berners-Lee read a story about a telephone network taking over the world, by which author?
Arthur C. Clarke
Arthur C. Clarke's 'Dial F for Frankenstein' stayed with him: he has credited the tale, in which enough linked machines start to think for themselves, as one of the inspirations for the Web.
Q 11What was the name of the hypertext prototype Berners-Lee built during his 1980 contract at CERN?
ENQUIRE
ENQUIRE was short for Enquire Within Upon Everything, a Victorian book of household advice; he wrote the program for his own use and never published it.
Q 12Berners-Lee spoke at the first Web conference in 1994, nicknamed after which music festival?
Woodstock
Woodstock of the Web is what the oversubscribed gathering came to be called: hundreds of the enthusiasts who applied had to be turned away.
Q 13Which CERN colleague became Berners-Lee's partner in launching the Web?
Robert Cailliau
Robert Cailliau, a Belgian systems engineer, co-wrote the 1990 management proposal, designed the Web's first logo and organised the first international Web conference in 1994.
Q 21In 1994 Berners-Lee founded the W3C at which institution?
MIT
MIT became the consortium's home when he left CERN in 1994; CERN itself, with the Large Hadron Collider to build, bowed out of Web development, and a French institute took its place.
Q 22Which language for structured data did the W3C publish in 1998, later used for RSS feeds and office documents?
XML
XML was also meant to tidy up web pages, but browser makers balked at the W3C's stricter XML-based page format and in 2004 set up their own group to keep the older language evolving.
Q 23In 2009 Berners-Lee apologised for which "unnecessary" feature of web addresses?
The double slash
The double slash did nothing, he admitted: he could easily have designed addresses without it, and joked that it had wasted time, printing and paper for almost 20 years.
Q 14Berners-Lee's first web browser, which also worked as an editor, ran on which operating system?
NeXTSTEP
NeXTSTEP ran on the black NeXT machine that doubled as the first web server, protected by a label handwritten in red ink: "This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!"
Q 15The first web server in the United States went online in 1991 at an accelerator laboratory run by which university?
Stanford
Stanford's accelerator centre got it after physicist Paul Kunz saw the Web on a visit to CERN and took the software home, where a librarian used it to put a database of research papers online.
Q 16On 6 August 1991 Berners-Lee posted a public invitation to collaborate on the WorldWideWeb project where?
Usenet
Usenet's alt.hypertext newsgroup carried his short summary of the project, and with it the Web made its debut as something anyone on the Internet could try.
Q 17On 30 April 1993 CERN made the Web protocol and code available on what terms?
Royalty-free
Royalty-free, in fact public domain: CERN gave up all rights to the code soon after the rival Gopher system's makers had alarmed users by asking for licence fees.
Q 18Which 1993 graphical browser from NCSA, able to show inline images, made the Web's popularity explode?
Mosaic
Mosaic came from the University of Illinois and within months ran on ordinary PCs and Macs, carrying the Web beyond the workstations of research labs.
Q 19Which American pioneer coined the word 'hypertext' in the 1960s, decades before Berners-Lee built the Web on it?
Ted Nelson
Ted Nelson began his own hypertext system, Project Xanadu, in 1960; working software finally appeared in 2014, 54 years later and long after the Web had taken over.
Q 20Berners-Lee's 1989 proposal argued for a web of links in place of which rigid structure for organising information?
A tree
A tree gives every item one unique place, as in a filing system, but he wrote that it could not model the real world, where a note on one branch keeps needing to point at another.
Q 24At which university did Berners-Lee accept a computer science chair in 2004?
Southampton
Southampton gave him a part-time post that he took to link its research with his own lab's in America; a colleague there later became his partner in opening up British government data.
Q 25With which fellow computer science professor did Berners-Lee create data.gov.uk and co-found the Open Data Institute?
Nigel Shadbolt
Nigel Shadbolt worked with him after the government asked in 2009 for help opening up its data; data.gov.uk followed within months and the Open Data Institute in 2012.
Q 26Berners-Lee's message during the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony, spelled out in LED lights, read what?
This is for everyone
"This is for everyone" lit up across the stadium seats as he typed it, and 13 years later he made the phrase the title of his memoir.
Q 27In 2004 Berners-Lee became the first winner of the Millennium Technology Prize, awarded by which country?
Finland
Finland's €1 million award was then the world's largest technology prize; the New York Times noted how many others, Amazon's Jeff Bezos among them, had already grown rich on his invention.
Q 28What is the name of the open-source startup Berners-Lee announced in 2018 to commercialise Solid?
Inrupt
Inrupt, where he serves as chief technology officer, builds on Solid so that people keep their data in personal stores and decide which apps may read it.
Q 29As W3C director in 2017, Berners-Lee approved which web standard over protests from digital-rights campaigners?
Encrypted Media Extensions
Encrypted Media Extensions let sites play copy-protected video without plug-ins; the Electronic Frontier Foundation appealed, lost, and resigned from the W3C when the standard was published.
Q 30Which name, later reused for a line of Android phones, did Berners-Lee give his first browser to distinguish it from the Web?
Nexus
Nexus replaced the original name, WorldWideWeb, which had made sense in 1990 when his program was the only way to see the Web at all.