Inventor: Tim Berners-Lee
Mariusz Hadrys
History & Structure of the Internet
Inventor: Tim
Berners-Lee
Criteria: Modern prototype
Birth: June 8, 1955 in London, England
Nationality: British
Invention: World Wide Web = WWW
Function: noun / hypertext document Retrieval system
Definition: Enquire was designed to allow people to work together by combining their knowledge in a web of hypertext documents. The Web consisted of URL, HTTP and HTML.
Patent: The Web is considered to be an open source project.
At a Glance
The World Wide Web (WWW) has revolutionized the computer and communications world like nothing before. The invention of the telegraph, telephone, radio, computer and Internet set the stage for this unprecedented integration of capabilities. Invented by Tim Berners-Lee in 1991, the Web has become a medium for collaboration and interaction between individuals and their computers without regard to geographic location.
Milestones
CAPS: Berners-Lee, Berners Lee, Tim Berners-Lee, World Wide Web, Enquire, Vinton Cerf, WWW, ARYS, Web, World Wide Web, communication, computer, url, http, html, SIPS, history, biography, inventor, inventor of, history of, who invented, invention of, fascinating facts.
Tim Berners-Lee graduated from the Queen's College at Oxford University, England, 1976. Whilst there he built his first computer with a soldering iron, TTL gates, an M6800 processor and an old television.
He spent two years with Plessey Telecommunications Ltd (Poole, Dorset, UK) a major UK Telecom equipment manufacturer, working on distributed transaction systems, message relays, and bar code technology.
In 1978 Tim left Plessey to join D.G Nash Ltd (Ferndown, Dorset, UK), where he wrote among other things typesetting software for intelligent printers, and a multitasking operating system.
A year and a half spent as an independent consultant included a six month stint (Jun-Dec 1980)as consultant software engineer at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. Whilst there, he wrote for his own private use his first program for storing information including using random associations. Named "Enquire", and never published, this program formed the conceptual basis for the future development of the World Wide Web.
From 1981 until 1984, Tim worked at John Poole's Image Computer Systems Ltd, with technical design responsibility. Work here included real time control firmware, graphics and communications software, and a generic macro language. In 1984, he took up a fellowship at CERN, to work on distributed real-time systems for scientific data acquisition and system control. Among other things, he worked on FASTBUS system software and designed a heterogeneous remote procedure call system.
In 1989, he proposed a global hypertext project, to be known as the World Wide Web. Based on the earlier "Enquire" work, it was designed to allow people to work together by combining their knowledge in a web of hypertext documents. He wrote the first World Wide Web server, "httpd", and the first client, "WorldWideWeb" a what-you-see-is-what-you-get hypertext browser/editor which ran in the NeXTStep environment. This work was started in October 1990, and the program "WorldWideWeb" first made available within CERN in December, and on the Internet at large in the summer of 1991.
Through 1991 and 1993, Tim continued working on the design of the Web, coordinating feedback from users across the Internet. His initial specifications of URLs, HTTP and HTML were refined and discussed in larger circles as the Web technology spread.
In 1994, Tim joined the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS)at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 1999, he became the first holder of the 3Com Founders chair. He is Director of the World Wide Web Consortium which coordinates Web development worldwide, with teams at MIT, at INRIA in France, and at Keio University in Japan. The Consortium takes as its goal to lead the Web to its full potential, ensuring its stability through rapid evolution and revolutionary transformations of its usage
Introduction
When Tim Berners-Lee, a scientist at CERN, implemented the first web server in 1990, he was possiblyunaware of the enormous repercussions of his initiative. The basic idea was to develop a system that allowed the scientists at different research centres to share information. Thus, the first people to access this technology were researchers, including those belonging to university centres. In Spain, the first web servers were installed in centres connected to RedIris (the Spanish research network), for example, the website of the Jaume I University at Castellón. The first Spanish web pages were created, thus, as the personal contributions of researchers and teachers, in relation to research, teaching or more general areas. By means of courses taught at Universities, by the training of skilled users, the technology was transmitted to the rest of society.
Discussion
A free and open Web starts with you. Share your love for the Web, engage in conversation, and spread the word to your friends with great Web Foundation content on Facebook, Twitter and more.
Usenet is a worldwide distributed Internet discussion system. It developed from the general purpose UUCP architecture of the same name.
comp.* – computer-related discussions (comp.software, comp.sys.amiga)
humanities.* – fine arts, literature and philosophy (humanities.classics, humanities.design.misc)
misc.* – miscellaneous topics (misc.education, misc.forsale, misc.kids)
news.* – discussions and announcements about news (meaning Usenet, not current events) (news.groups, news.admin)
rec.* – recreation and entertainment (rec.music, rec.arts.movies)
sci.* – science related discussions (sci.psychology, sci.research)
soc.* – social discussions (soc.college.org, soc.culture.african)
talk..* – talk about various controversial topics (talk.religion, talk.politics, talk.origins)
Conclusions
A wide range of services can be offered by a university centre. The implementation and maintenance of such services require the employment of qualified personnel for the different areas involved (server administration, databases, programming, graphic design, HTML, etc.) and full-time dedication to these tasks, avoiding dependence on voluntary or sporadic contributions from other members of the university community. There exist commercial tools such as WebCT (www.webct.com) that provide some of the services described here, but in many cases it would be better to make a custom implementation, for best compatibility with the databases already used by a particular university and with its specific necessities.
The use of these services by the members of the university community should be encouraged, replacing many conventional mechanisms by those offered by modern technology. Most such services should be implemented by the central services of the university, and the individual faculties or schools could then use them after adaptation to their particular graphic and web designs.
Finally, the applications described do not require end-users to be experts in new technologies. There exist web page creation and editing tools that do not presuppose knowledge of HTML or need any new software to be installed on the user’s computer, for example, ‘Wiki’ (wiki.org) or HTML editors based on Javascript.
Bibliography
http://40384569.nhd.weebly.com/bibliography.html
http://isbndb.com/d/person/berners_lee_tim.html
http://inventors.about.com/od/bstartinventors/p/TimBernersLee.htm