   #copyright

Tim Berners-Lee

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Computing People

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

Background and early career

   Berners-Lee was born in London, England, the son of Conway Berners-Lee
   and Mary Lee Woods. His parents, 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 study his O-Levels and A-Levels at Emanuel School in
   Wandsworth where he learned about computer science. He is an alumnus of
   Queen's College (where he played tiddlywinks for Oxford, against rival
   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 was employed at Plessey Controls Limited (in Poole whose main
   business is traffic lights) in 1976 as a programmer. He met his first
   wife Jane while at Oxford and they married soon after they started work
   in Poole. Jane also worked at Plessey Telecommunications Limited in
   Poole. In 1978, he worked at D.G. Nash Limited (also in Poole) where he
   wrote typesetting software and an operating system.

World Wide Web

   This NeXTcube was used by Berners-Lee at CERN and became the first Web
   server.
   Enlarge
   This NeXTcube was used by Berners-Lee at CERN and became the first Web
   server.

   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. While
   there, 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." . 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 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/ 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 Web. In December 2004 he accepted a chair in Computer Science at
   the School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of
   Southampton, UK, where he will be working on his new project — the
   Semantic Web.

   Berners-Lee made 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.

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.
     * On July 21, 2004 he was presented with the degree of Doctor of
       Science ( honoris causa) from Lancaster University.
     * 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. Time
       Magazine included Berners-Lee in its list of the 100 most
       influential people of the 20th century, published in 1999.

Works

     * Berners-Lee, Tim, Mark Fischetti (1999). Weaving the Web: Origins
       and Future of the World Wide Web. Britain: Orion Business. ISBN
       0-7528-2090-7.

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