Tim Berners-Lee

Sir Timothy "Tim" John Berners-Lee, KBE, FRS (TimBL or TBL) (born June 8, 1955 in London) is the inventor of the World Wide Web and director of the World Wide Web Consortium, which oversees its continued development.

Background and early career

Berners-Lee was born in London, UK, the son of Conway Berners-Lee and Mary Lee Woods. His parents, who were both mathematicians, were employed together on the team that built the Manchester Mark I, one of the earliest computers. They taught Berners-Lee to use mathematics everywhere, even at the dinner table. Berners-Lee attended Sheen Mount Primary School (which has dedicated a new hall in his honour) before moving on to Emanuel School in Wandsworth. He is an alumnus of Queen's College (where he played tiddly-winks for Oxford, against rivals Cambridge), Oxford University (which has dedicated a computer room in his honour), where he built a computer with a soldering iron, TTL gates, an M6800 processor and an old television. While at Oxford, 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 where he married his first wife Jane, a fellow employee, and in 1978, he worked at D.G. Nash Limited where he wrote typesetting software and an operating system.

World Wide Web

In 1980, while an independent contractor at CERN from June to December 1980, Berners-Lee proposed a project based on the concept of hypertext, to facilitate sharing and updating information among researchers. With help from Robert Cailliau he built a prototype system named ENQUIRE.

After leaving CERN in 1980 to work at John Poole's Image Computer Systems Ltd., he returned in 1984 as a fellow. In 1989, CERN was the largest Internet node in Europe, and Berners-Lee saw an opportunity to join hypertext with the Internet: "I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the TCP and DNS ideas and — ta-da! — the World Wide Web." w3.org - Answers for Young People. He used similar ideas to those underlying the Enquire system to create the World Wide Web, for which he designed and built the first web browser and editor (called WorldWideWeb and developed on NeXTSTEP) and the first Web server called httpd (short for HyperText Transfer Protocol daemon).

The first Web site built was at http://info.cern.ch/ World Wide Web — Archive of world's first website and was first put online on August 6, 1991. It provided an explanation about what the World Wide Web was, how one could own a browser and how to set up a Web server. It was also the world's first Web directory, since Berners-Lee maintained a list of other Web sites apart from his own.

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 Web sites 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. In December 2004 he accepted a chair 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. To this day, Tim Berners-Lee maintains a low profile, not intent on gaining popular status.

In 1999, Berners-Lee commented on the NeXT Computer on which he ran the first Web server and created the first web browser and editor: "The NeXT interface was beautiful, smooth, and consistent. It had great flexibility, and other features that would not be seen on PCs till later, such as voice e-mail, and a built-in synthesizer. it also had software to create a hypertext program. Its failure to take over the industry, despite all these advantages, became for me a cautionary tale. NeXT required users to accept all these innovations at once – too much." Tim Berners-Lee, “Weaving the web,” p. 28, 1999 While the component ideas of the World Wide Web are still simple, Berners-Lee's insight was to combine them in a way which is still discovering its full potential. Perhaps his greatest single contribution, though, was to make his idea available freely, with no patent and no royalties due. The World Wide Web Consortium decided that their standards must be based on royalty-free technology, so they can be easily adopted by anyone. Patent Policy - 5 February 2004

Sir Tim Berners-Lee's genius is not confined to, or prejudiced by, computer technology. In a 2005 interview with BBC Television, he made a statement which shows his opinion of the reach of the internet as an informational resource.

"Even the clearest, cleverest and most comprehensive website can not hope to equal the wealth of information contained in a good reference book. The internet is most definitely not a substitute for a well-stocked public library".

Weaving the Web

In Berners-Lee's book Weaving the Web, several recurring themes are apparent:

It is just as important to be able to edit the Web as browse it. (Wiki is a step in this direction, although Berners-Lee considers it merely a shadow of the WYSIWYG functionality of his first browser.)
Computers can be used for background tasks that enable humans to work better in groups.
Every aspect of the Internet should function as a Web, rather than a hierarchy. Notable current exceptions are the Domain Name System and the domain naming rules managed by ICANN.
Computer scientists have a moral responsibility as well as a technical responsibility.

Recognition

The University of Southampton was the first to recognise Berners-Lee's contribution to developing the World Wide Web with an honorary degree in 1996 and he currently holds a Chair of Computer Science in the School of Electronics and Computer Science. He was the first holder of the 3Com Founders Chair at MIT, and is also now a Senior Research Scientist there. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society, an Honorary Fellow of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In 1997 he was made an Officer in the Order of the British Empire, became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2001, and received the Japan Prize in 2002. In 2002 he received the Principe de Asturias award in the category of Scientific and Technical Research. He shared the prize with Lawrence Roberts, Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf. Also in 2002, the British public named him among the 100 Greatest Britons of all time, according to a BBC poll spanning the entire history of the nation.

On April 15, 2004 he was named as the first recipient of Finland's Millennium Technology Prize for inventing the World Wide Web. The cash prize, worth one million euros (about £663,000 or USD$1.2 million), was awarded on June 15, in Helsinki, Finland by President of the Republic of Finland, Tarja Halonen. He was given the rank of Knight Commander (the second-highest rank in the Order of the British Empire) by Queen Elizabeth II as part of the New Year's Honours on July 16, 2004. Creator of the web turns knight, BBC News (16 July, 2004)

On July 21, 2004 he was presented with the degree of Doctor of Science (honoris causa) from Lancaster University. Lancaster University Honorary Degrees - July 2004 On January 27, 2005 he was named Greatest Briton of 2004 for his achievements as well as displaying the key English characteristics of "diffidence, determination, a sharp sense of humour and adaptability" as put by David Hempleman-Adams, a panel member. Three loud cheers for the father of the web, Telegraph news (filed 28/01/2005)Time Magazine included Berners-Lee in its list of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century, published in 1999.

In the novel "Angels and Demons" by Dan Brown, the title character Robert Langdon visits CERN and sees a plaque that credits Tim Berners-Lee for inventing the Web.

Current life

In 2001, he became a patron of the East Dorset Heritage Trust having previously lived in Colehill in Wimborne, East Dorset, England.

He is now living in Lexington, Massachusetts (USA) with his wife and two children.

Works

Notes

References

Tim Berners-Lee and the Development of the World Wide Web (Unlocking the Secrets of Science) Ann Gaines (Mitchell Lane Publishers, 2001) ISBN 1584150963
Tim Berners-Lee: Inventor of the World Wide Web (Ferguson's Career Biographies) Melissa Stewart (Ferguson Publishing Company, 2001) ISBN 089434367X children's biography
How the Web was Born: The Story of the World Wide Web Robert Cailliau, James Gillies, R. Cailliau (Oxford University Press, 2000) ISBN 0192862073
Sir Tim Berners-Lee
Tim Berners-Lee laureate of the Millennium Technology Prize
Profile of Tim Berners-Lee – patron of East Dorset Heritage Trust
Tim Berners-Lee, World Wide Web inventor, to join ECS
School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton
Audio interview - 2005-11-19
BBC2 Newsnight – Video interview clip of Berners-Lee on the read/write Web
Technology Review interview
Audio interview by Christopher Lydon

External links

Berners-Lee's home page
Berners-Lee's blog
Berners-Lee's book Weaving The Web which details his views on the history and future of the Web.
World Wide Web Consortium
The W3 History page
Berners-Lee's original proposal to CERN
Archive of the world's first Web site (November 13, 1990)
Tim Berners-Lee at the Notable Names Database
Berners-Lee talk entited "The Future Of The Web" given at the Oxford internet institute High resolution MP4 Low Resolution MP4 Slides for the talk
Tim Berners-Lee considers new TLD's harmful
Tim Berners-Lee on the Future of the Web at Princeton -- April 2006

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