His dream is to ensure the stability of the Web by making sure it remains a tool that can evolve with the times.īerners-Lee is most proud of the achievements of his W3 Consortium over the last few years. There he became director of the W3 Consortium. The Web really began growing, he joined the Laboratory for Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Over the next several years, Berners-Lee continued working on his design for the Web, accepting feedback from people who used the system. After developing a language to encode documents, a way to link documents, and a way to address documents (the The software, accompanied by a simple browser (a device that helps the user cruise the Web, looking for subject matter) was put on the Internet. Eventually the system could go worldwide, he proposed. It was not until the birth of the Internet in 1989, that Berners-Lee proposed that CERN's computer resources- whether graphics, text, or video-could be linked with software based on Enquire. Because of this need for a centralized clearinghouse, hypertext documents couldn't be linked worldwide. In such a system, if one document was deleted all the links to it would be deleted. This device, which Berners-Lee used to assist his memory, is now known as "hypertext." It was not a new concept but, like most hypertext software of the 1980s, it needed a centralized database to eliminate links that went nowhere. It allowed him to put words in a document that, when clicked, would send the user on to other documents with a fuller explanation. When he realized that he had to master the lab's huge and confusing information system in six months, he created a software program called Enquire. in Dorset, he served a six-month stint as an independent consultant at the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, which sits on the French-Swiss border. Created the Building Blocks of the WebĪfter graduating from Queens College in 1976, with a degree in physics, Berners-Lee got his first job with Plessey Telecommunications, Ltd., in Dorset. There he built his first computer with a soldering iron, an M6800 processor (the "brain" that runs the computer), and an old television. It was only a short step from this type of fiction to his study of physics and computers at Oxford University's Queen's College. Clarke's short story "Dial F for Frankenstein," in which computers are networked together to form a living, breathing human brain. He remembers conversations at the dinner table as centering around mathematics it was more likely to be about the square root of four than the neighbors down the block.Īs a teenager, Berners-Lee read science fiction voraciously and was fascinated with Arthur C. As a boy, he spent his time making toy computers out of boxes. His English parents helped design the first computer that was commercially available worldwide, the Ferranti Mark I. Developed Affinity for Computersīerners-Lee developed a hunger for knowledge and a fascination with computers early in his life. To that end, he heads the World Wide Web Consortium, a group of 120 companies that set standards and guide the growth of the Web. He remained a conscientious scientist, and an advocate for using the Web as a way to link the world for the benefit of all. Berners-Lee, however, refused to cash in on his invention. The Web has become a way for many businesses to sell themselves or their products and has made money for some computer scientists. He posted this software, free of charge to anyone who wanted it, on the Internet. Documents could then be linked worldwide. But Berners-Lee developed software that contained processes for encoding documents (HTML, hypertext markup language), linking them (HTTP, hypertext transfer protocol), and addressing them (URL, universal resource locator). On the original Internet, there were no easy ways to retrieve data. Simply put, the Web provides a way to retrieve and access documents on the Internet, the bare-bones network devised by the Pentagon that links computers around the world. Some experts claim that the World Wide Web has revolutionized the ability of computer users around the world to connect to each other. Yet his invention, which provides an easy way to access the Internet, has made a huge impact on modern business and communications. Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the software program known as the World Wide Web in 1989, is a scientist in the true sense of the word-idealistic, interested in the pure pursuit of knowledge, and uncomfortable in the media spotlight.
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