Tim Berners-Lee Audiobooks

This Is for Everyone: the man who invented the web tells its unfinished story

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Who is Tim Berners-Lee?

Tim Berners-Lee was born in London in 1955 to two parents who had worked on one of the first commercial computers, read physics at Oxford, and in March 1989 handed his manager at CERN a proposal for an information management system. The response, famously, was ‘vague but exciting’. By the end of that year he had written the first web browser, the first web server, and the specifications behind HTML, URLs and HTTP.

The decision that mattered most came next. He and CERN released the lot royalty-free, refusing to patent the web, and everything built since rests on that choice. He founded the World Wide Web Consortium in 1994 and has spent three decades arguing about what the thing ought to become, latterly through the Open Data Institute and his work on personal data ownership.

He was knighted in 2004, received the Turing Award in 2016, and appeared at the London Olympics opening ceremony to type four words: this is for everyone.

Tim Berners-Lee in audiobooks

This Is for Everyone is memoir and argument in a single volume, taking its title from the message he typed in the Olympic Stadium in 2012. It runs from a childhood of home-built electronics through the CERN years to a blunt reckoning with what the web became: surveillance, consolidation, and the handful of companies now sitting between people and their own data.

The inspired choice is the narrator. Stephen Fry reads it, bringing exactly the right mixture of delight and impatience to a story that is part triumph and part warning. Nearly twelve hours, and it never once feels like a technical manual.

Listeners here have rated it warmly, and it works just as well for people who have never written a line of code as for those who have. It is waiting below.