Tim Berners-Lee
Tim Berners-Lee:
father of the web and champion of IT freedom
Dotcoms, bloggers and Google all have one man to thank for their place in the 21st century world. In 1990,
Tim Berners-Lee made the imaginative leap to combine the internet with the hypertext concept, and the worldwide web was born.
Born in 1955 in London, Berners-Lee’s parents were both mathematicians who were employed together on the team that built the Manchester Mark I, one of the earliest computers.
After attending school in London, Berners-Lee went on to study physics at Queen’s College, Oxford, 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 from 1976 as a programmer and in 1980 began working as an independent contractor at the European nuclear research centre Cern.
In December 1980, Berners-Lee proposed a project based on the concept of hypertext, to facilitate sharing and updating information among researchers. While there, he built a prototype system called Enquire.
He joined Cern on a full-time basis in 1984 as a fellow. In 1989, Cern was the largest internet node in Europe, and Berners-Lee saw an opportunity. “I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the TCP and DNS ideas,” he said, and the worldwide web was born.
He wrote his initial proposal in March of 1989, and in 1990, with the help of Robert Cailliau, produced a revision which was accepted by his manager, Mike Sendall.
He used similar ideas to those underlying the Enquire system to create the worldwide web, for which he designed and built the first web browser and editor (called World-wide Web and developed on Nextstep) and the first web server called Hypertext Transfer Protocol Daemon (HTTPD).
The first website built was at https://info.cern.ch/ and was put online on 6 August 1991. The URL is still in use today. It provided an explanation of the worldwide web, 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 websites.
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 web.
Berners-Lee made his ideas available freely, with no patent and no royalties due. He is now the director of W3C, a senior researcher at MIT’s CSail, and professor of computer science at Southampton University.