Biography
Early Life
Tim Berners Lee, the son of Conway Berners Lee and Mary Lee Woods, was born on June 8th 1955 in a town outside of southwest London, England. Tim was one of four children and went to primary school in London. In 1973 Tim attended the Queens College at Oxford, where he designed and built his first computer. In 1976 Tim graduated with a degree in physics and began his journey in creating the World Wide Web.
Early Carrer
Tim Berners Lee began working just after college as an independent contractor for a company call CERN. While working at CERN, Tim established the concept of hypertext, the ability to share and update information among researchers, his prototype for this system was called ENQUIRE.
Tim left CERN in 1980 to go work for John Poole’s Image Computer Systems. While working for Mr. Poole Time was able to gain valuable experience in computer networking. After roughly four years of work and the knowledge needed Tim would later go back to working for CERN.
In 1989, while working at CERN, Tim Berners Lee proposed his idea for a global hypertext project and began to write the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), this information was based off Tim’s early program ENQUIRE. By the end of the year Tim Berners Lee had also written programs such as Universal Resource Identifier (URI) and a client browser to retrieve and view hypertext documents. He called the browser “The World Wide Web.”
World Wide Web
The internet and the World Wide Web are often misconstrued to mean the same thing; however, you will find that they are not the same at all. The Internet is merely the global connection of computer networks. In contrast the World Wide Web (also Known as “WWW,” “Web,” or “W3”) is a service provider on the internet. The World Wide Web is a collection of informative documents that are linked together by hyperlinks and URLs.
The World Wide Web was created in 1989 by Tim Berners Lee while working at CERN. The idea at the time was to develop a system to link data between CERN’s many incompatible computers. The result was the World Wide Web. Berners Lee tried to sell his program, which was based off his earlier work with ENQUIRE, but CERN was uninterested. So in 1991 Berners Lee made the World Wide Web browser and web server software available on the Internet. As expected the Web became an instant hit and computer enthusiasts around the world started to create their own web servers. Tim Berners Lee’s dream of global information was finally becoming a reality.
Recent News
In 2004, Tim Berners Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web and director of the World Wide Web Consortium, was given one the highest recognitions by his country by becoming Knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. In 2009, Berners Lee was elected to become a foreign associate of the United States National Academy of Sciences. Recently Tim Berners Lee was honored in a brief showing at the opening ceremonies of the 2012 Summer Olympics in his hometown of London, England. Tim is also, currently a professor at MIT and continues his work of promoting the Web as an accessible, interactive, and global community. He has most recently written a book about his past, present, and future visions of his creation, “Weaving the Web.” In 2012 Tim Berners Lee was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame.
Awards
- 1997 Awarded an Order of the British Empire
- 1999 Named "One of the 100 greatest mind of the century" by Time Magazine
- 2004 Knighted by Queen Elizabeth II
- 2005 Common Wealth Award
- 2006 President's Medal
- 2007 Awarded the Order of Merit
- 2012 Internet Hall of Fame