A description...



Tim Berners-Lee

Introduction

Tim Berners-Lee as many people know is the man credited with inventing the World Wide Web, now known as WWW by everyone. He was born in London on the 8th of June 1955. He went to the local primary and then attended secondary school in London. He entered The Queens College, Oxford in 1973 where he received a degree in physics.1

He had a vision of a global information space where information stored on computers everywhere was linked and available to anyone anywhere. His inspiration came partly out of necessity because in 1980 he got a temporary job as a software consultant at CERN (the well-known particle physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland). CERN was and still is well known for its particle physics research and experimentation but it was also a perfect playground for Berners-Lee and what he was about to invent. As you can imagine CERN was and is an extremely large organisation with workers located all around the world. Tim Berners-Lee thought: “It would be so much easier if everyone asking me questions all the time could just read my database, and it would be so much nicer if I could find out what these guys are doing by jumping into a similar database for information from them”2 and so the World Wide Web as we know it was created.

Discussion

Nearly all of us use the web on a daily basis but we don’t give much thought about how the technology and the Internet itself got to where it is today. It was people like Tim Berners-Lee who pioneered the development of the World Wide Web. We very much take it for granted this days but the Web is still young and is constantly evolving.

When he began work at CERN, Tim Berners-Lee started up a project on hypertext in order to share information among researchers at the organisation. The first prototype he built was named ENQUIRE. It was a very basic predecessor to the World Wide Web but more importantly it was a starting point for Berners-Lee. After 4 years away from CERN to pursue other avenues, he came back to CERN in 1984 and stayed until 1994, in which time he continued with his work on ENQUIRE.3 With the Internet already up and running, Berners-Lee had everything he needed to develop his vision of a global information space open to everyone.

In 1990 Berners-Lee wrote the Hypertext Transfer Protocol-HTTP, which was a language computers would use to communicate hypertext documents over the Internet. He also designed a scheme to give each document on the Internet an address. He called it a Universal Resource Identifier-URI (Now known as a Uniform Resource Locator-URL). He then wrote a program for formatting hypertext pages called the Hypertext Markup Language-HTML. The first web server ever was made by Berners-Lee at CERN. It was known as”into.cern.ch” and it can now be seen at the museum at CERN.4

In 1991 he made his World Wide Web Browser and server public and it took off. People started building their own servers and linking on to his, thereby making a Web of computers linked together over the Internet.

In 1994 Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium-W3C after he become concerned that with the success of the Web, proprietary Web products could be created that would destroy the open nature of the Web. The W3C was formed to basically keep an eye on what was happening with the Web and keep standards in place. He was quick to emphasise that this would not be something that would try and alter the free and open character of the Web but help the Web develop smoothly. The first W3C conference was held at CERN in the summer of 1994 but by the end of the year both the W3C and Berners-Lee had moved to MIT in Massachusetts, America which became the new headquarters of the W3C.5 He has gained much recognition over the years. He has won multiple awards and even knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 2004.

The World Wide Web today is used by almost everyone in the developed world. We use it for everything from chatting to our friends and family to doing our banking online and from purchasing goods to keeping up with current affairs. With multimillion dollar industries like Facebook, Amazon, YouTube and Google leading the way and utilising all the web has to offer. It was people like Tim Berners-Lee who started all of it and it’s easy to overlook that.

Conclusion

Tim Berners-Lee started something that turned out to be bigger than he could possibly have imagined. The Web today is an essential tool we use to communicate with one another. It changed the way we do things in a lot of ways. Instead of going shopping we can simply sit down in front of a computer and browse our way through page after page of goods on a massive number of websites. You can do all of your banking online now in a safe and secure place. You have access to an almost infinite number of documents, pictures and videos. With the amount of content out there, the World Wide Web will live on for a long long time to come and only has the capacity to get bigger and better in the future. Tim Berners-Lee earned his place in human history and with people like him around the future is looking bright.









References

  1. http://en.wiki.org/wiki/Tim_Berners_Lee

Retrieved 04/10/2011


  1. www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,0171,986354,00.html

Retrieved 03/10/2011


  1. www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,0171,986354,00.html

Retrieved 03/10/2011


  1. www.ibiblio.org/pioneers/lee.html

Retrieved 05/10/2011


  1. www.ibiblio.org/pioneers/lee.htm

Retrieved 05/10/2011

Jonathan Tobin