Timothy John Berners-Lee (b. 1955) is an English computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web, the global system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed over the internet. [1] In 1989, while working at the European physics laboratory CERN, he proposed an information-management system that combined hypertext with existing internet protocols; by 1991 he had built the first web browser, the first web server, and the world's first website. [4]
Early life and education
Berners-Lee was born on 8 June 1955 in London to Conway Berners-Lee and Mary Lee Woods, both mathematicians who had worked on the Ferranti Mark 1, one of the earliest commercial computers. [1] He was educated at Emanuel School and went on to study physics at The Queen's College, University of Oxford, graduating in 1976. After university he worked as a software engineer for several companies before taking up a post at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, near Geneva.
Invention of the World Wide Web
In 1989 Berners-Lee submitted a proposal for an information-management system to help physicists at CERN share documents across incompatible computers. Building on the internet and the concept of hypertext, he devised three foundational technologies that still underpin the web: HTML, the markup language for formatting pages; URLs, a uniform scheme for addressing resources; and HTTP, the protocol for transferring them. [4] By the end of 1990 he had written the first browser and server, and the world's first website went online in 1991. In 1993 CERN released the underlying software into the public domain, allowing the web to spread freely and without royalties.
The World Wide Web Consortium
In 1994 Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to develop open standards for the web and to safeguard its long-term interoperability. [3] He served as the consortium's director and held professorships at MIT and, later, the University of Oxford. A consistent advocate for an open and decentralised web, he has campaigned for net neutrality, universal access, and individual control over personal data.
Later work and advocacy
Berners-Lee co-founded the World Wide Web Foundation in 2009 to promote the web as a public good and to expand affordable access worldwide. Concerned about the concentration of personal data within a small number of large platforms, he launched the Solid project, which seeks to give individuals greater control over their own information, and co-founded the company Inrupt to support it. [1]
Legacy and honours
Berners-Lee is regarded as one of the most influential figures of the digital age. In 2004 he was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and in 2007 he was admitted to the Order of Merit, one of the highest personal honours in the United Kingdom. [1] A Fellow of the Royal Society, he has received numerous international awards, including the Japan Prize, the Millennium Technology Prize, and the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering. In 2017 he received the ACM A.M. Turing Award, often called the "Nobel Prize of computing," for inventing the World Wide Web. [2]
