Friday, 29th March 2024
To guardian.ng
Search

TIM BERNERS-LEE: The Man Who Created The World Wide Web (www)

By Dr. Nicholas Okoye (DBA)
03 October 2015   |   12:35 am
Tim Berners Lee is a British computer scientist who is credited with inventing the World Wide Web (WWW). Berners-Lee enabled a system to be able to view web pages (hypertext documents) through the internet. He also serves as a director for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) which overseas standards for the internet and World…

Berners-Lee-CopyTim Berners Lee is a British computer scientist who is credited with inventing the World Wide Web (WWW). Berners-Lee enabled a system to be able to view web pages (hypertext documents) through the internet. He also serves as a director for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) which overseas standards for the internet and World Wide Web. Berners-Lee has also been concerned about issues relating to freedom of information and censorship on the internet.

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.

0 Comments