The Introduction of Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee
Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee (born 8 June 1955) also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist. He is the inventor of the World Wide Web and a professor of computer science at the University of Oxford and MIT. He has made an outstanding contribution to the development of the Internet.
Berners-Lee's parents were computer scientists who worked on the development of the Ferranti Mark 1, the first commercially manufactured computer. So he was influenced by their interest in computers from an early age. While at university, Berners-Lee built a computer from an old television set that he bought from a repair shop. After graduating, Berners-Lee took a job as an electrical engineer, during which time he proposed a project based on the concept of hypertext to facilitate the sharing and updating of information between researchers. In 1989 Berners-Lee tried to combine hypertext with CERN, the largest Internet node in Europe at the time.
In March 1989 Berners-Lee wrote his proposal and then in 1990 he designed and built the first web browser and the first web server CERN HTTPd together with his partners.
On 20 December 1990, Berners-Lee published the first website describing the project itself, which allowed access to the INTERNET from the CERN network and explained what the World Wide Web was and how people could use the browser and set up the web server.
As Gandon (2017) has stated in his book, Berners-Lee won the Turing Award in 2016 for inventing the World Wide Web and the first web browser, as well as various protocols and algorithms, which have transformed our society since its creation in 1989.
In 2004, Berners-Lee was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his pioneering work.
He was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most important people of the 20th century and received many other accolades for his inventions.
He was awarded the title of "Inventor of the World Wide Web" at the opening ceremony of the 2012 Summer Olympics.
He designed and implemented the first web browser and web server and contributed to the subsequent explosive growth of the web. Now, he is still working in the field, devoting himself to the Semantic Web, which is the new generation of the Internet, using technologies such as Resource Description Framework (RDF) and Web Ontology Language (OWL).
McPherson (2010) has written in his book that Berners-Lee, the man people queued up to hear him speak, was the inventor of the World Wide Web. tim's creation dramatically changed the way many people around the world work, play, learn and communicate, and its influence continues to grow as people add new pages every day.
1. Gandon, F. 2017. For everything: Tim Berners-Lee, winner of the 2016 Turing award for having invented… the Web. Available at: https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01843967/
2. McPherson, S.S. 2010. Tim Berners-Lee: Inventor of the World Wide Web. Minneapolis: Twenty-First Century Books.