Tim Berners-Lee

Tim Berners-Lee is a British computer scientist who invented the World Wide Web (WWW).

Berners-Lee was born on 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. An essential 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.

He later said that all the technology involved in the web had already been developed – ‘hypertext’, the 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.

Essentially the contribution of the World Wide Web was to make it easy for people to view hypertext web pages anywhere on the internet. The essential elements of this new development was:

A universal system for recognising the location of web pages (Uniform Resource Locator, URL)

HTML – Hypertext Markup Language – how web pages are published.

Hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) – serves up web pages on request.

Or as Tim Berners-Lee said:

“I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the TCP and DNS ideas and — ta-da!— the World Wide Web.”

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 organisation to try to improve the quality and standard of the world wide web. He could have tried to monetise his creation but decided to offer the world wide web with no patent and no royalties due.

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. He has expressed concerns the US may move to a two-tier internet system.

“When I invented the web, I didn’t have to ask anyone’s permission. Now, hundreds of millions of people are using it freely. I am worried that that is going end in the USA.” Net Neutrality: This is Serious (June 2006)

In 2009, he worked in a project set up by Gordon Brown to help make UK data more publically available. Data.gov.uk. Writing about the importance of the internet, Berners-Lee has stressed the importance of improving communication between people within an interconnected world.

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 recognised for his invention of the world wide web in the 2012 Summer Olympics opening ceremony. During the ceremony, he tweeted “this is for everyone.” The tweet was shown live to the 80,000 audience and tv spectators.

He has married twice – first to Jane Northcote. He married for a second time – Nancy in 1990; they have two children. He is a member of the Unitarian Universalist (UU) Church and appreciates the liberal, ecumenical approach of the church, which stresses the “the inherent dignity of people and in working together to achieve harmony and understanding.”

Despite the scope of his invention, Berners-Lee is not rich. Unlike contemporaries, such as Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape who is now a millionaire. For many years he drove a 13-year-old VW Beatle, recently replaced with a VW EOS. He seems content with the non-profit path he took.

“You’re right though. I’m not very materialistic. I enjoy being in nature, so protecting nature would be how I would want to spend money.”