Tim Berners-Lee

Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee (born 8 June 1955), also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. He is a Professorial Fellow of Computer Science at the University of Oxford and a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Berners-Lee proposed an information management system on 12 March 1989, then implemented the first successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and server via the internet in mid-November.

Berners-Lee is the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) which oversees the continued development of the Web.

Things he did:

In 1989, CERN was the largest internet node in Europe, and Berners-Lee saw an opportunity to join hypertext with the internet:

He just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the Transmission Control Protocol and domain name system ideas and the World Wide Web. Creating the web was really an act of desperation, because the situation without it was very difficult when I was working at CERN later. Most of the technology involved in the web, like the hypertext, like the internet, multifont text objects, had all been designed already. I just had to put them together. It was a step of generalising, going to a higher level of abstraction, thinking about all the documentation systems out there as being possibly part of a larger imaginary documentation system.




Berners-Lee published the first web site, which described the project itself, on 20 December 1990; it was available to the Internet from the CERN network.

info.cern.ch was the address of the world's first-ever website and web server, running on a NeXT computer at CERN. The first webpage address was http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html, which centred on information regarding the WWW project. Visitors could learn more about hypertext, technical details for creating their own webpage, and even an explanation on how to search the Web for information. There are no screenshots of this original page and, in any case, changes were made daily to the information available on the page as the WWW project developed. You may find a later copy (1992) on the World Wide Web Consortium website.

Awards

• Turing Award (2016)
• Queen Elizabeth Prize (2013)
• Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences(2009)
• Order of Merit (2007)
• ACM Software System Award (1995)