Tim Berners-Lee
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2 Proposal and prototype 3 The first website 4 No royalties 5 Recognition 6 Weaving the Web 7 See also 8 External links |
Berners-Lee was born in London, England, and as a child, studied at Emanuel School in Wandsworth. He is an alumnus of the Queen's College of Oxford University, where, interestingly, he built a computer with a soldering iron, TTL gates, an M6800 processor and an old television. It was also at Oxford where he was caught hacking with a friend and was banned from using the university computer soon after.
Before he invented the World Wide Web, he had plenty of programming experience. He worked at Plessey Telecommunications Limited in 1976 as a programmer, and in 1978 he worked at D.G Nash Limited where he worked on typesetting software and an operating system.
In 1980, while an independent contractor at CERN, Berners-Lee proposed a project based on the concept of hypertext, to facilitate sharing and updating information among researchers. With help from Robert Cailliau he built a prototype system named Enquire.
After leaving CERN to work at John Poole's Image Computer Systems Ltd, he returned in 1984 as a fellow. He used similar ideas that he used in Enquire to create the World Wide Web, for which he designed and built the first browser (called WorldWideWeb and developed on NeXTSTEP) and the first web server simply called httpd.
The first web site Berners-Lee built (and therefore the first web site) was at info.cern.ch and was first put online on August 6, 1991. It provided an explanation about what the World Wide Web was, how to get your own browser, how to set up your own web server and so on. It was also the world's first web directory, since Berners-Lee maintained a list of other web sites apart from his own.
While the component ideas of the World Wide Web are simple, Berners-Lee's insight was to combine them in a way which is still exploring its full potential. Perhaps his greatest single contribution, though, was to make his idea available freely, with no patent and no royalties due. In 1994 he founded World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in 2003, the organization decided that their standards must be based on royalty-free technology, so they can be easily adopted by anyone.
Berners-Lee became the first holder of the 3Com Founders Chair at MIT, and is now a Senior Research Scientist there.
In 1997 he was created an Officer in the Order of the British Empire, and on July 16, 2004 was made a Knight Commander as part of the New Year's Honours [1].
He is a Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society, an Honorary Fellow of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2001.
He received the Japan Prize in 2002.
On April 15, 2004 he was named as the first recipient of the Finland's Millennium Technology Prize for inventing the World Wide Web. The cash prize, worth one million euros (about ã663,000 or USD$1.2 million), was awarded on June 15, in Helsinki, Finland by Tarja Halonen.
On July 16, 2004 he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. The 49 year old computer scientist received the second highest rank in the Order of the British Empire, the rank of Knight Commander.
In Berners-Lee's book Weaving the Web (ISBN 006251587X), several recurring themes are apparent:
Early life and career
Proposal and prototype
The first website
No royalties
Recognition
Weaving the Web
See also
External links