Tim Berners-Lee

    Primary Company/Organization: European Organization for Nuclear Research

    Introduction

    Like those of many innovators, Tim Berners-Lee's career has been one of collaboration. Very few, however, can claim such a high degree of individual responsibility for a major accomplishment as he can in developing the World Wide Web. Working as a fellow at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Conseille Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, or CERN), he created a means by which large amounts of technical and scientific information could be stored, accessed, and freely shared by a large community. This system, which in its early years was used exclusively at CERN, became available on the Internet and has changed nearly every aspect of life in social, economic, political, and cultural spheres of activity. In addition to his continuing efforts to advance the technology of the web, he has been active in advocating its value in improving life on a global basis. He has created the World Wide Web Foundation in order to determine how the web can improve people's lives and has consistently supported practices and technologies that will maintain free access to information and exchange unhindered by governments or commercial organizations.

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    Early Life

    Born in London, England, on June 8, 1955, Tim Berners-Lee was one of four children. His parents, Conway Berners-Lee and Mary Woods, were both mathematicians and involved in early computer development. In 1973, he began studies at Queen's College, Oxford University. He was, for a time, suspended as punishment for his hacking into the Oxford computer system. He graduated in 1976 with a degree in physics.

    His first position was at Plessey Telecommunications, where he stayed until 1978, when he left to work for D. G. Nash. At Nash, he wrote computer programs to support printing documents and developed a computer operating system. In 1980, Berners-Lee worked for six months as a consulting contractor for the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN. While there, he began a project to find ways to store information.

    In 1980, the concept of hypertext—accessing text by clicking links embedded in another text—already existed, having been developed by Ted Nelson and Douglas Engelbart in the early 1960s. Building on what was known at the time, Berners-Lee began to work on a hypertext system that would make communication among CERN's staff and scientists easier and more effective. That increased access was necessary; the amount of research and the size of the research and development teams were growing, and success of CERN activities required rapid and complete accessibility.

    Berners-Lee left CERN in 1980 to work for Image Computer Systems, where he remained until 1984. While there, he gained experience in programming for computer networks. In 1984, Berners-Lee returned as a fellow at CERN and began the work that would result in the World Wide Web.

    Life's Work

    When Berners-Lee returned to CERN, he was able to work on some of the concepts he had explored and experimented with a few years before, when he was a contractor. His original ideas of creating the ability to share large amounts of complex information, his work on hypertext to expand communication abilities, and his recent experience working on computer networks combined to place him in a position to begin what would be his most important project.

    In 1989, Berners-Lee proposed a hypertext project with the intent of creating a collection of CERN documents that could be linked and then easily accessed by researchers. In the following year, using a NeXTStep computer (manufactured by NeXT, the company Steve Jobs created after leaving Apple in 1985), Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau placed the information on a server (the NeXTStep computer). Berners-Lee then accessed it from the same machine and was able to read it and access additional data using hypertext links. To be able to navigate to, and access, that information, Berners-Lee developed a software tool called a browser. The World Wide Web, as it would be called, was used exclusively on an internal basis at CERN until 1991. In August, the world's first website was created and the web became available on the larger Internet. That first webpage described the World Wide Web, how it worked, how pages could be created and managed, and the web's objectives.

    Over the next two years, as the web was used more widely, substantial modifications were made to the software components that made it operate. These elements were improved on a continuing basis and included creating webpage addresses (uniform resource locators, or URLs) and the hypertext transfer (or transmission) protocol (HTTP) that made communications among users at different computers and access to information residing on distant computers possible. In addition, the manner of creating, organizing, and formatting web pages was further developed through the modifications made to hypertext markup language (HTML), a language based in part on the already existing standardized general markup language (SGML).

    Berners-Lee was not only an innovator, however, recognizing that something as immense as the World Wide Web would be able to work only if innovations and technologies were held to rigid standards such as existed in other technical fields. Since the early 1990s, he has been director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). This organization, headquartered at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), combines both academic and commercial organizations and acts as the web standards organization. Berners-Lee has stated that one of the objectives of the web should be that, regardless of where an individual is or what kind of equipment (hardware or software) he or she uses, the user should be able to access the same information in both substance and appearance.

    In addition to monitoring technical aspects of the web's growth and development, W3C functions to advance ideas and standards that essentially emerged from Berners-Lee's outlook. At W3C, the standards are based on open systems. Nothing is dependent on proprietary or licensed technologies or information.

    Just as important as technical developments is the nature of the web itself and how independent it is from external enmities. Berners-Lee's comment about any user anywhere being able to access the same information is not just a technical operating goal. The ability of users to access information freely, without government or commercial interference, is essential to the democratic and open nature of the web, as he envisions it. His work with the British government (starting in 2009) has shown just how a conflict of those ideals with government interests could affect open and free access. Britain's official map-making agency, the Ordnance Survey, has opposed to some cartographic information, for example. W3C also opposes another type of restriction: the censorship of searches that Google performed (and stopped doing in 2010).

    In 2009, in addition to directing W3C, Berners-Lee assumed the role of director of the World Wide Web Foundation, an organization that seeks to explore how the web can best be used to further humanitarian causes. In addition, Berners-Lee has held a part-time computer science professorship at the University of Southampton, as well as positions at MIT and the University of Oxford.

    In 2019, Berners-Lee took a sabbatical and established Inrupt, a software start-up, with the intention to decentralize the web. Inrupt's data-browser app, called Solid, is designed to give users seamless access to various online functions such as e-mail, calendars, photo storage, and task lists, while preserving user control over all of their data.

    Personal Life

    Berners-Lee married Nancy Carlson in 1990 and had two children; the couple divorced in 2011. He married Rosemary Leith in 2014.

    Berners-Lee has received honorary degrees from several universities, including Harvard, Oxford, Lancaster University, the University of Manchester, Columbia, and the Parsons School of Design. He is an honorary fellow of the Society for Technical Communication. Other honors include being appointed first an officer (OBE, 1997) and then a knight commander (KBE, 2004) of the Order of the British Empire, the 1998 Charles Babbage Award for UK information technology (IT) innovation, a MacArthur Fellowship, and the 2007 Charles Stark Draper Prize. In 1995, Berners-Lee received the Software System Award from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in conjunction with his collaborator on the development of the web, Robert Cailliau. In 2002, he shared the Prince of Asturias Award for technical and scientific research with Larry Roberts, Robert Kahn, and Vinton Cerf, whose work on developing the ARPANET led to the eventual development of the Internet.

    Berners-Lee was knighted in 2004 by Queen Elizabeth II, became a foreign associate of the National Academy of Science, and in 2012 was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame. He was awarded the ACM's 2016 A. M. Turing Award, named for computer scientist and mathematician Alan Turing, "for inventing the World Wide Web, the first web browser, and the fundamental protocols and algorithms allowing the Web to scale." The following year he received the inaugural Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering.

    Bibliography

    Berners-Lee, Tim. “Long Live the Web.” Scientific American, Dec. 2010, pp. 80–85. Academic Search Complete, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=55151920&site=ehost-live. Accessed 5 May 2017.

    Berners-Lee, Tim. Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web by Its Inventor. With Mark Fischetti, HarperSanFrancisco, 1999.

    Berners-Lee, Tim, et al. “World-Wide Web: The Information Universe.” Electronic Networking, vol. 2, no. 1, 1992, pp. 52–58. Internet Archive, archive.org/details/02Kahle000673. Accessed 5 May 2017.

    Gillies, James, and Robert Cailliau. How the Web Was Born: The Story of the World Wide Web. Oxford UP, 2000.

    "Inventor of World Wide Web Receives ACM A. M. Turing Award." A. M. Turing Award, Association for Computing Machinery, 4 Apr. 2017, awards.acm.org/binaries/content/assets/press-releases/2017/april/turing-award-2016.pdf. Accessed 5 May 2017.

    McCabe, Maisie. "The Future of the Web . . . by the Man Who Invented It." Campaign, 30 July 2015, www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/future-web-man-invented/1357956. Accessed 5 May 2017.

    McCracken, Harry. "The Web at 25: Revisiting Tim Berners-Lee's Amazing Proposal." Time, 12 Mar. 2014, time.com/21039/tim-berners-lee-web-proposal-at-25/. Accessed 5 May 2017.

    Shadbolt, Nigel, and Tim Berners-Lee. “Web Science Emerges.” Scientific American, Oct. 2008, pp. 76–81. Academic Search Complete, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=34236715&site=ehost-live. Accessed 5 May 2017.

    Seneviratne, Oshani, and James Hendler, eds. Linking the World's Information: Essays on Tim Berners-Lee's Invention of the World Wide Web, Association for Computing Machinery, 2023.