Sir Timothy John “Tim” Berners-Lee is one of the most important persons in the last twenty years. Thanks to his revolutionary work, we can be reading this blog post at the moment. To Know more about him, in the following lines it is going to be explained why is so important.
He was born 8 June 1955 in London, he graduated the Queen’s College at Oxford University and he is a computer scientist who is known as the inventor of the World Wide Web.
In March 1989, while he was at the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, Tim Berners-Lee submitted a proposal for an information management system to his boss, Mike Sendall. There it was said that he wanted to concern the management of general information about accelerators and experiments at CERN. Which is a large international organization that involves a big number of researchers located around the world.
Initially, his proposal received no reply, but anyway he began working on his idea .There were discussed the problems of loss of information about complex evolving systems and it was derived a solution based on a distributed hypertext system. After that proposal to his boss and thanks to the help of Robert Cailliau he implemented the first succesful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and a server through the Internet around mid November. By the end of the year he also he wrote a client program (browser) to retrieve and view hypertext documents. This client was called “WorldWideWeb.”
During 1991 and 1993 he continued designing the Web by combining feedback from different users on the internet. After a hard work he made the WorldWideWeb browser and the web server available on the Internet. But until computer enthusiasts from all over the world started setting up their own web servers the Web did not began to take off. The first Web page was served by the end of 1990. In 1991, people outside of CERN joined the new Web community, and in April 1993, CERN announced that the World Wide Web technology would be available for anyone to use on a royalty-free basis. Since that time, it can be said that the Web has completely changed the world
In 2007, it was recognized by Tim that the Web’s potential to help people to bring a change still remained unrealized. He made public his commitment throuh the World Wide Web Foundation to ensure an open, free Web accessible and meaningful to all. A place where everybody could share knowledge, access services, conduct commerce, participate in good governance and communicate in creative ways.
Actually he is the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), that was founded in 1994 ,which oversees the Web´s continued development. Apart from that Tim has also founded the World Wide Foundation and he is a senior researcher and holder of the Founders Chair at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). It can not be forgotten that he is also a director of the Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI), and a member of the advisory board of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence.
If we have a look to the awards that he has won it can be seen that are more than 25 awards. This means that he is a very relevant person who has worked hard to reach his aims. Maybe the most important one is that he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his pioneering work in 2004. During the 2012 Summer Olympics opening ceremony, he was honoured as the ”Inventor of the World Wide Web”. This year has won his last award which is the inaugural Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, and he has shared with other five Internet and Web pioneers.
References:
Tim Berners-Lee. (2013, March 18). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 17:12, April 1, 2013, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Tim_Berners-Lee&oldid=545216408
Tim Berners-Lee.(2013, March 18). In World Wide Web Consortium.Retrieved 17:12, April 1, 2013, from http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/
Sir Tim Berners-Lee. In World Wide WebFoundation. Retrieved 17:12, April 20, 2013, http://www.webfoundation.org/about/sir-tim-berners-lee/.
Filed under: Web Communication 
