Tim Berners-Lee

Introduction

Sir Timothy John “Tim” Berners-Lee, OM, KBE, FRS, FREng, FRSA, aka, The Godfather of the Web, was born on the 8^th of June 1955 in London. He studied at The Queens College, Oxford where he received a First Class Degree in physics. He graduated in 1976.

Discussion

By 1980 he was working at CERN the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. This was only a temporary position, contracted as a software engineer. When his contract at CERN expired, he returned to Britain to work at John Poole's Image Computer Systems in Bournemouth in England.

Even though his time at CERN was brief, it was long enough for him to invent a program or hypertext system called Enquire. He termed this a '' memory substitute''. It was something of a database which remembered links between various scientists and projects at the CERN lab. So, in 1984 when he returned to work, in a more full time position at CERN, the seed had already been planted. He saw this as an ideal opportunity to work on and develop his original hypertext or memory substitute project. In 1989 he made his first proposal for a global hypertext project. This was to be known as the World Wide Web and was largely based on his earlier Enquire project.

His new system would allow researchers and scientists to combine their own information and knowledge and link it together across different networks, different computer systems and different countries. The two main goals of the project were: open design and network distribution. So it could, in effect, run on any computer anywhere in the world.

A fellow scientist named, Robert Cailliau, teamed up with Sir Tim and collaborated with him to get his goal realised. They needed funding and technical staff. They worked together on the Hypertext Transfer Protocol idea and in the Autumn of 1990, Sir Tim wrote the worlds first web client, World Wide Web and web server ''httpd'', a hypertext browser/editor which ran in the NeXTStep environment. Both Berners-Lee and Cailliau were communicating with the worlds first web server at info.cern.ch on the 25^th 1990. Some of the first documents available on the web were the phone numbers of the thousands of CERN scientists. This proved itself to be a highly useful to all CERN employees at the time and became a popular reference, therefore creating traffic on the new World Wide Web. That was the starting point for the internet as we know it today.

Other browsers had to be written in order to suit the different computer operating systems and environments such as Mac, PC and Unix for example and the technology grew at a very fast rate.

In the meantime Tim Berners-Lee has continued to work on and refine his ideas and theories on the development of the web. In 1994 Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and since its inception he has served as its director. The consortium coordinates web development worldwide.

Its purpose was to lead the web to its full potential. Sir Tim is also a Principal Research Scientist at the Massachusetts Instute of Technology Laboratory for Computer Science (MIT LCS).

Conclusion

The web is more a social creation than a technical one. I designed it for a social effect—to help people work together—and not as a technical toy. The ultimate goal of the Web is to support and improve our weblike existence in the world. We clump into families, associations, and companies. We develop trust across the miles and distrust around the corner.

— Tim Berners-Lee

The aim of this essay is to describe the contribution of a single individual to the internet as we know it today. It was through the work of many individuals together that this technological masterpiece was finally realised. Sir Tim Berners-Lee will definitely stand out amongst the greats as a true visionary in every sense of the word. His valuable contribution to the internet as we know it today is certainly one of the most important ever made.

To this day he is an authority on how the internet is developed and how it will be used in the future. Making sure it is available to everybody at a reasonable expense with a reasonable quality. So not only his past contributions are valid here but also his future offerings will be equally important. He continues to invent and innovate and is going to be responsible for the way we see and utilise the internet, now and far into the future.