Tim invented the World Wide Web in late 1990 while working at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. He wrote the first WWW client (a browser-editor running under NeXTStep) and the first WWW server along with most of the communications software, defining URLs, HTTP and HTML. Prior to his work at CERN, Tim was a founding director of Image Computer Systems, a consultant in hardware and software system design, real-time communications graphics and text processing, and a principal engineer with Plessey Telecommunications in Poole, England. He is a graduate of Oxford University.

Tim is now the overall Director of the W3C. He is a Senior Research Scientist at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science.