Tim Berners-Lee

Sir Timothy John Berners -Lee, OM, KBE, FRS, FRSA ( born June 8, 1955 in London ) is a British physicist and computer scientist. He is the inventor of HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) and the founder of the World Wide Web. Today, he stands before the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C ), a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and holds a chair at the University of Southampton since 2004 held.

Biography

Early years

Tim Berners- Lee is the son of a mathematician - married couple who co-developed the Manchester Mark I. He worked already as a teenager with computers. After graduating from Emanuel School in Battersea, he studied at the University of Oxford in England Physics, Queens College where he graduated in 1976. It was followed by two years with Plessey Telecommunications Ltd ( Poole, UK). In 1978 he moved to DG Nash Ltd ( Ferndown, UK), where he worked as a software developer. In his time as a consulting engineer he had from June to December 1980 his first contact with the European nuclear research center CERN. 1981 to 1984 he was director of Image Computer Systems in Bournemouth, but returned in 1984 back to CERN.

Berners -Lee and the World Wide Web

A problem at CERN was that some of the laboratories were located on French territory, another part on Swiss territory. In both countries there was a different network infrastructure that impeded the exchange of information, if not impossible. On March 12, 1989, Berners- Lee suggested to his employer CERN before a project which was based on the principle of hypertext and should facilitate the global exchange and updating of information among scientists. In 1990 he published with Robert Cailliau, a concept for a global hypertext project. In the aftermath Berners -Lee developed the HTML page description language, the transfer protocol HTTP, the URL (the name, however, came only later ), the first World Wide Web browser and the first Web server, CERN httpd under the operating system NeXTSTEP. This should be the origin of the World Wide Web.

Berners -Lee created the first website, http://info.cern.ch. This site gives it to this day; However, there is of the original content, only a copy from the year 1992. It explained, among other things,

  • What should be the World Wide Web,
  • How to get to a web browser,
  • How to set up a web server.

Originally, this was also the first simple search engine, as Berners -Lee in charge nor any other web sites other than its own.

The basic idea of the World Wide Web are relatively easy to grasp. Berners -Lee saw and joined them but in a way that their options have not been fully exploited to date.

In 1994, Berners -Lee, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C ) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It was important that he not patented his ideas and technical implementations, but can be freely passed on. Also on the maxim of the World Wide Web Consortium to adopt only patent-free standards, he had a strong influence.

In his book Weaving the Web ( German: The Web Report, 1999), for example, emphasizes the following:

  • To edit the Web is just as important as to browse the Web.
  • Computers can be used to complete tasks in the background, so groups can better work together.
  • Each area of the Internet should rather have a network structure as a tree structure. Notable exceptions are the domain name system and the rules for assigning domain names by ICANN.
  • Computer carry not only a technical but also a moral responsibility.

Berners- Lee's vision of the future of the Internet is the semantic web.

In 2006, he called in his essay "Creating a Science of the Web" the establishment of an independent Webwissenschaft.

News

Currently Berners -Lee lives with his wife Nancy and his children Alice and Ben in Lexington, Massachusetts, USA. He is since 1999 the owner of the 3Com Founders Chair at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In addition, he is the World Wide Web Consortium ago, he founded the open forum of companies and organizations, which accompanies the further development of the WWW.

For 2010, the World Wide Web was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Since only institutions with personal representatives may be excellent, Tim Berners -Lee was jointly proposed by Larry Roberts and Vint Cerf.

Berners -Lee took in 2012 at the Opening Ceremony of the XXX. Olympics part in London, where he was honored for the invention of the World Wide Web.

In 2014, he called in the wake of the Global surveillance and espionage affair a reason, right catalog for the internet and the parting of the assignment of domain names and IP addresses from American hands.

Awards

Honorary doctorates

  • Doctor of Fine Arts ( DFA hon. ), Parsons The New School for Design, New York City, 1996
  • Doctor of University ( DU hon. ), University of Essex, 1998
  • Doctor of University ( DU hon. ), Southern Cross University, 1998
  • Doctor of University ( DU hon. ), Open University, 2000
  • Doctor of Laws ( DLaw hon. ), Columbia University, 2001
  • Doctor of Science ( DSc hon. ), University of Southampton, 1996
  • Doctor of Science ( DSc hon. ), Oxford University, 2001
  • Doctor of Science ( DSc hon. ), University of Port Elizabeth, 2002
  • Doctor of Science ( DSc hon. ), Lancaster University, 2004
  • Polytechnic University of Madrid, 2009
Order of Merit NeXTcube WorldWideWeb Web Science Trust Lexington (Massachusetts) W. Wallace McDowell Award MacArthur Fellows Program Japan Prize Elizabeth II Millennium Technology Prize Charles Stark Draper Prize Integrated Authority File
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