Tim Berners-Lee

Tim Berners-Lee is a renowned British- born computer scientist credited with inventing the World Wide Web (WWW). Berners-Lee a system enabled to view web pages or documents of hypertext over the Internet. He also serves as a director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which oversees standards for the Internet and the World Wide Web. Tim Berners-Lee also worries about issues related to freedom of information and internet censorship .

Tim Berners-Lee Biography

Tim Berners-Lee was born on June 8, 1955 in London, England . After studying at the Emanuel School, he entered Queen’s College at Oxford University , where he received a first-rate degree in physics .

After graduation, he managed to get a job for a printing company in Plessey, Poole. Since 1980, he worked as an independent contractor in Switzerland. An essential part of his work consisted in sharing information with researchers in different geographic locations and in order to help in this process, he suggested a project based on the use of hypertexts , a language to share texts electronically. The first prototype was a system known as INQUIRE .

In 1990 , with the help of Robert Cailliau , he created the first version of the World Wide Web , the first web browser, and the first web server . It went online in 1991. ” Info.cern.ch “ was the address of the world’s first website and web server, which was run on a NeXT computer at CERN. The first web page address was  http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html .

Inventions

He developed what by its acronym in English is called: HTML or Hypertext Label Language ; the HTTP protocol (HyperText Transfer Protocol), and the system for locating objects on the web URL (Uniform Resource Locator).

Input from Tim Berners-Lee

Some of the main contributions of Tim Berners-Lee are the following:

• In 1988, he proposed a draft hypertext , which would be known as World Wide Web (www) whose meaning is Cobweb Global Outreach . He ran a project known as ” Inquire “, allowing people to work together by combining their knowledge on a hypertext document web.
• He wrote the first www server, ” httpd “, and the first client, ” WorldWideWeb “, a hypertext browser / editor which ran in the NeXTStep environment .
• In 1978, he worked for DG Nash Ltda. Where he wrote, among other things, a typographic software for smart printers , and a multitasking operations system .
• From 1981 to 1984, he worked at John Poole’s Image Computer Systems Ltd., where he developed a real-time signature control system , graphics and communications software , and a generic macro language .
• In 1994, Tim founded the World Wide Web Consortium which became the Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science in 2003 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
• He wrote, together with Mark Fischetti, the book ” Weaving the Web “, which tells the whole story about the past, present and future of the Web.

Importance

It is important because he was the first person who managed to establish communication between a server and a client using the HTTP protocol , supervised and standardized the development of the necessary technologies on which the Web is founded and also that allow the proper functioning of the internet in addition to the creation of the HTML language .

Acknowledgments

There are many recognitions for their work, some of the most important are:

• The University of Southampton awarded him an Honoris Causa degree in 1996.
• Honorary member of the Institute of Electrical Engineers and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .
• Prize Prince of Asturias in the category of Scientific and Technical Research.
• In May 2006 he was made an honorary member of the Royal Society of Arts .
• Millennium Technology Award , for the World Wide Web.
• He received the rank of Knight Rider from Queen Elizabeth II on July 16, 2004.
• Honoris Causa of Doctor of Science , from the University of Lancaster.
• Charles Stark Draper , 2007.
• Awarded the Order of Merit of Great Britain .
• IEEE / CSR Wolfson James Clerk Maxwell Award for conceiving and helping to develop the World Wide Web.
• Degree of Doctor Honoris Causa from the Open University of Catalonia .
• Doctor Honoris Causa from the Polytechnic University of Madrid .
• Doctor Honoris Causa of the Free University of Amsterdam .

Current job

Tim Berners-Lee holds the Chair of Informatics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , where he leads the Decentralized Information Group and directs Solid, a joint project with the Qatar Institute for Computing Research , which aims to radically change the way we Web applications work today. In October 2016, he joined the Science Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford and Professorial Research Fellow and a member of Christ Church, one of the universities of Oxford.

Tim Berners-Lee Quotes

Some of his most famous phrases are:

• The web is more of a social creation than a technical one.
• Legend has it that each new technology was used for the first time with something related to sex or pornography . That seems to be the way of humanity.
• It is interesting that people throughout the existence of the web have been concerned about monopolies .
• In many ways, people who grow up with the Web and now the Semantic Web take power in their hands for granted.
• It is hard to imagine the power that you will have when so many different types of data are available.

Curiosities

He does not own a late-model car but has been traveling in an old Volkswagen Rabbit for 13 years, he is not interested in presiding over any successful new company, despite the hundreds of this format that have appeared lately, and his office is small.