Tim Berners-Lee

Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the software program known as the World Wide Web in 1989, is a scientist in the true sense of the word—idealistic, interested in the pure pursuit of knowledge, and uncomfortable in the media spotlight. Yet his invention, which provides an easy way to access the Internet, has made a huge impact on modern business and communications. Some experts claim that the World Wide Web has revolutionized the ability of computer users around the world to connect to each other.

Simply put, the Web provides a way to retrieve and access documents on the Internet, the bare-bones network devised by the Pentagon that links computers around the world. On the original Internet, there were no easy ways to retrieve data. But Berners-Lee developed software that contained processes for encoding documents (HTML, hypertext markup language), linking them (HTTP, hypertext transfer protocol), and addressing them (URL, universal resource locator). Documents could then be linked worldwide. He posted this software, free of charge to anyone who wanted it, on the Internet.

The Web has become a way for many businesses to sell themselves or their products and has made money for some computer scientists. Berners-Lee, however, refused to cash in on his invention. He remained a conscientious scientist, and an advocate for using the Web as a way to link the world for the benefit of all. To that end, he heads the World Wide Web Consortium, a group of 120 companies that set standards and guide the growth of the Web.

Developed Affinity for Computers

Berners-Lee developed a hunger for knowledge and a fascination with computers early in his life. His English parents helped design the first computer that was commercially available worldwide, the Ferranti Mark I. As a boy, he spent his time making toy computers out of boxes. He remembers conversations at the dinner table as centering around mathematics; it was more likely to be about the square root of four than the neighbors down the block.

As a teenager, Berners-Lee read science fiction voraciously and was fascinated with Arthur C. Clarke's short story "Dial F for Frankenstein," in which computers are networked together to form a living, breathing human brain. It was only a short step from this type of fiction to his study of physics and computers at Oxford University's Queen's College. There he built his first computer with a soldering iron, an M6800 processor (the "brain" that runs the computer), and an old television.

Created the Building Blocks of the Web

After graduating from Queens College in 1976, with a degree in physics, Berners-Lee got his first job with Plessey Telecommunications, Ltd., in Dorset. In 1980, after working at D.G. Nast Ltd. in Dorset, he served a six-month stint as an independent consultant at the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, which sits on the French-Swiss border. When he realized that he had to master the lab's huge and confusing information system in six months, he created a software program called Enquire. It allowed him to put words in a document that, when clicked, would send the user on to other documents with a fuller explanation. This device, which Berners-Lee used to assist his memory, is now known as "hypertext." It was not a new concept but, like most hypertext software of the 1980s, it needed a centralized database to eliminate links that went nowhere. In such a system, if one document was deleted all the links to it would be deleted. Because of this need for a centralized clearinghouse, hypertext documents couldn't be linked worldwide.

It was not until the birth of the Internet in 1989, that Berners-Lee proposed that CERN's computer resources— whether graphics, text, or video—could be linked with software based on Enquire. Eventually the system could go worldwide, he proposed.

It wasn't long before it did. After developing a language to encode documents, a way to link documents, and a way to address documents (the www.whatever address seen on Web pages), Berners-Lee posted his property on the Internet. The software, accompanied by a simple browser (a device that helps the user cruise the Web, looking for subject matter) was put on the Internet.

Appointed Director of Web Consortium

Over the next several years, Berners-Lee continued working on his design for the Web, accepting feedback from people who used the system. In 1994, as the popularity of the Web really began growing, he joined the Laboratory for Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There he became director of the W3 Consortium. His dream is to ensure the stability of the Web by making sure it remains a tool that can evolve with the times.

Berners-Lee is most proud of the achievements of his W3 Consortium over the last few years. It has made the encoding language HTML 3.2 a widely used standard, which helps make traveling the Web easy for the average computer user. It has also proposed a chip that would let parents keep offending Web sites from their computers— and their children's eyes. Individual parents could use the chip and get ratings of Web sites by subscribing to a rating service of their choice.

Campaigned for Better Web

The growing lack of intimacy and the increasing number of companies who charge for access to their Web sites, are two developments that disappointed Berners-Lee. "The Web was supposed to be a creative tool, an expressive tool," he said. Berners-Lee remains an avid campaigner for keeping the Web open, for making sure no one company dominates it. "He has a real commitment to keep the Web open as a public good, in economic terms," the director of the MIT computer science lab, Michael Dertouzos, explained in a 1995 New York Times article. Berners-Lee considered trying to commercialize the Web as he was designing it and was approached by several software companies who wanted to buy it. But in the end, he remained an idealist and refused all offers, instead making the Web available to all.

One of his biggest fears about the Internet is that various competing browsers or competing programming languages could all set up their own turf, so that users would need several types of browsers or languages to access the entire Web. "The navigation of the Web has to be open," he insists. "If the day comes when you need six browsers on your machine, the World Wide Web will no longer be the World Wide Web."

Received Awards for Web Work

Berners-Lee has his own Web site (www.W3.org/People/Berners-Lee). He is continually bombarded by requests from the press for interviews and gets many questions from inveterate Web users. Berners-Lee has received numerous awards for his work on the Web, including the Kilby Foundation's "Young Innovator of the Year Award" in 1995. He has honorary degrees from the Parsons School of Design and Southhampton University and is a Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society. Yet in public he remains a diffident man, who reveals very little personal information in interviews. He is married to Nancy Carlson, an American. They met in Europe while both were taking an acting class; she was then working for the World Health Organization. They have two children, one born in 1991, the other in 1994. Despite his diffidence with the press, he is a warm, artistic man who can be the life of a party, his friends say.

Further Reading

Forbes ASAP, April 8, 1996.

New York Times, February 18, 1995.

Time, May 19, 1997.

"Tim Berners-Lee." http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee (7 October 1997). □

Tim Berners-Lee
1955-

Inventor of the World Wide Web

Background

Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web, revolutionizing the Internet and making the vast sums of information it contained easily accessible to anyone with a computer. Born 8 June 1955, in London, Berners-Lee was encouraged to think creatively about science from an early age. He studied physics at Queen's College, Oxford, graduating in 1976, and once built a working computer out of spare parts and a TV set. After attending Oxford, he spent two years working for Plessey Telecommunications Ltd., a major British Telecom equipment manufacturer, and then at D. G. Nash Ltd. From June to December 1980 he consulted as a software engineer at CERN (Conseil European pour la Recherché Nucleaire) in Geneva.

Inventing the Web

While at CERN Berners-Lee wrote a program designed for storing information using random associations and called it "Enquire," short for Enquire Within Upon Everything (1856), a Victorianera encyclopedia he remembered from his childhood. "Enquire" was never published, but it later became the basis for the development of the World Wide Web. The program was written, as he put it, to "keep track of all the random associations one comes across in real life and brains are supposed to be so good at remembering but mine wouldn't." Later, while working again at CERN, he proposed a global hypertext project, to be known as the World Wide Web, which would build on his earlier "Enquire" software. He could already link documents within his own computer, but he wanted to be able to link documents from one computer to another without having to manage a central database. He figured the easiest way to accomplish this task was to open his computer to others and allow them to link their documents with his. To this end, he wrote a relatively easy-to-learn coding system called HyperText Mark-Up Language (HTML), which allowed Internet users to add links into their text. Berners-Lee also designed an addressing scheme that gave each Web page a unique location, or universal resource locator (URL), and a set of rules that allowed these documents to be linked together on computers across the Internet. He called that set of rules HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP). With this new addressing system, nearly any Net document—text, picture, sound, or video—could be retrieved and viewed on the World Wide Web. Berners-Lee then created the first World Wide Web browser, which would allow users anywhere to view his creation on their computer screen. He proposed his project in 1989, began work in 1990, and the World Wide Web debuted on the Internet in 1991. From that point the Internet and World Wide Web grew as one.

WWW

The impact of his invention was enormous. He took a system whose difficulty to navigate limited its use to academic and scientific communities, and made it useful and available to the world. In five years the number of Internet users jumped from six hundred thousand to forty million. His approach allowed for maximum openness and flexibility. All World Wide Web documents are similar, but every browser can be different. Berners-Lee fought to keep the World Wide Web open, nonproprietary, and free. In 1994 he went to work at MIT, directing the W3 Consortium, the standard-setting body that helped software designers and other companies to agree on openly published protocols rather than holding one another back with proprietary technology. Five years later he became the first holder of the 3Com (Computer Communication Compatibility) Founders chair at the Laboratory for Computer Science at MIT.

Sources:

Joshua Quittner, "Network Designer: Tim Berners-Lee," TlME.com, Internet website.

"Tim Berners-Lee," W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), Internet website.