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.
