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| Tim Berners Lee, |
He was born on the 8th June
1955 in London, England. After doing his A Levels at Emanuel School, he went to
Queen’s College, Oxford University, where he received a first class degree in
physics. After graduation, he gained employment for a printing firm in Plessey
Poole. From 1980, he was employed as an independent contractor at CERN in
Switzerland.
A key part of his job
involved sharing information with researchers in different geographical
locations. To help this process, he suggested a project based on the use of
hypertext (a language for sharing text electronically). The first prototype was
a system known as ENQUIRE.
The internet had been
developed since the 1960s as a way to transfer information between different
computers. However, Tim Berners Lee sought to make use of internet nodes and
combine it with hypertext and the idea of domains. Tim Berners Lee later said
that all the technology involved in the web had already been developed –
‘hypertext’, internet; his contribution was to put them all together in one
comprehensive package.
In 1990, with the help of
Robert Cailliau, he produced the first version of the World Wide Web, the first
web browser and the first web server. It was put online in 1991. “Info.cern.ch
was the address of the world’s first-ever web site and web server, running on a
NeXT computer at CERN. The first web page address was http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html.
Most importantly, the
contribution of the World Wide Web was to make it easy for people to view
hypertext web pages anywhere on the internet. In 1994, Berners-Lee founded W3C
(World Wide Web Consortium) at the Laboratory of Computer Science (LCS) at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston. This is an organization to try
to improve the quality and standard of the World Wide Web. He could have tried
to monetize his creation, but decided to offer the World Wide Web with no
patent and no royalties due. Berners-Lee said if he did not do so, someone else
would have come up with a free idea later.
As a founder of the World
Wide Web, Tim Berners Lee has a relatively high profile and he has often spoken
up for the freedom of information and net neutrality – arguing that governments
should not be involved in censorship of the internet.
In 2009, he worked in a project
set up by Gordon Brown to help make
UK data more publically available, Data.gov.uk. He has received many orders
including an OBE, knighthood and Order of Merit – becoming one of only 24
living members entitled to the honour. He was knighted in 2004 for “services to
the global development of the Internet”
Tim Berners Lee was
recognized for his invention of the World Wide Web in the 2012 Summer Olympics
opening ceremony. On 30 March 2011, he was one of the first three recipients of
the Mikhail Gorbachev award for “The Man Who Changed the World”, at the
inaugural awards ceremony held in London. The other recipients were Evans
Wadongo for solar power development and anti-poverty work in Africa, and media
mogul Ted Turner. He has married. He and his
current wife have three children. (guardian)
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