Tim Berners-Lee

Sir Timothy John "Tim" Berners-Lee, KBE, FRS (TimBL or TBL) (born June 8, 1955) is the inventor of the World Wide Web and Director of the World Wide Web Consortium, which oversees its continued development.

World Wide Web

Proposal and prototype

In 1980, while an independent contractor at CERN (June - December 1980), Berners-Lee proposed a project based on the concept of hypertext, to facilitate sharing and updating information among researchers. With help from Robert Cailliau he built a prototype system named Enquire.

Related Topics:
1980 - CERN - Hypertext - Robert Cailliau - Enquire

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After leaving CERN in 1980 to work at John Poole's Image Computer Systems Ltd, he returned in 1984 as a fellow. By 1989, CERN's internet site was the largest in Europe, and Berners-Lee saw an opportunity to marry hypertext and internet. In his words, "I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the TCP and DNS ideas and ? ta-da! ? the World Wide Web" http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/Kids. He used similar ideas to those underlying the Enquire system to create the World Wide Web, for which he designed and built the first browser (called WorldWideWeb and developed on NeXTSTEP) and the first web server simply called httpd (which was short for HyperText Transfer Protocol daemon).

Related Topics:
CERN - Image Computer Systems - 1984 - World Wide Web - WorldWideWeb - NeXTSTEP - Httpd - Daemon

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The first website

The first website Berners-Lee built (and therefore the first web site) was at http://info.cern.ch/ (which has been archived) and was first put online on August 6, 1991. It provided an explanation about what the World Wide Web was, how one could own a browser, how to set up a web server, and so on. It was also the world's first web directory, since Berners-Lee later maintained a list of other web sites apart from his own.

Related Topics:
August 6 - 1991

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Web standards

In 1994, Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It comprised various companies willing to create standards and recommendations to improve the quality of the Internet.

Related Topics:
1994 - World Wide Web Consortium - Massachusetts Institute of Technology - Internet

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Many of the World Wide Web Consortium's achievements are able to be seen in many websites on the Internet. In 1996, in conjunction with Håkon Wium Lie, the W3C announced a standard entitled Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). It was not until 2000 and 2001 that popular browsers began to support this standard, which shows Berners-Lee's first goal to maintain the freedom of the Web.

Related Topics:
1996 - Håkon Wium Lie - Cascading Style Sheets - 2000 - 2001

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In December 2004 he accepted a chair (professorship) in Computer Science at the School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, UK. He will be working closely with the University on the Semantic Web — his new project.

Related Topics:
December 2004 - Computer Science - University of Southampton - Semantic Web

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To this day, Tim Berners-Lee maintains a low profile, not intent on gaining popular status.

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No royalties

While the component ideas of the World Wide Web are simple, Berners-Lee's insight was to combine them in a way which is still exploring its full potential. Perhaps his greatest single contribution, though, was to make his idea available freely, with no patent and no royalties due. The World Wide Web Consortium decided that their standards must be based on royalty-free technology, so they can be easily adopted by anyone.

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