Tim Berners-Lee

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Tim Berners-Lee
Millennium Technology Prize
Year awarded:	2004
Invention:	World Wide Web
Prize presented by:	Tarja Halonen
Previous laureate:	First recipient, no previous laureates
Following laureate:	Shuji Nakamura

Sir Timothy John "Tim" Berners-Lee, KBE, FRS, FREng, FRSA, (born June 8, 1955) is the inventor of the World Wide Web, director of the World Wide Web Consortium (which oversees its continued development), and a senior researcher and holder of the 3Com Founders Chair at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL)[1]. Informally, in technical circles, he is sometimes called "TimBL" or "TBL".

Contents 1 Background and early career 2 World Wide Web 3 Weaving the Web 4 Recognition 5 Current life 6 Works 7 See also 8 Footnotes 9 References 10 External links

Background and early career

Berners-Lee was born in London, England, the son of Conway Berners-Lee and Mary Lee Woods. His parents, both mathematicians, were employed together on the team that built the Manchester Mark I, one of the earliest computers. They taught Berners-Lee to use mathematics everywhere, even at the dinner table. Berners-Lee attended Sheen Mount Primary School (which has dedicated a new hall in his honour) before moving on to study his O-Levels and A-Levels at Emanuel School in Wandsworth.

He is an alumnus of The Queen's College, Oxford where he played tiddlywinks for Oxford, against rival Cambridge. While at Queen's, Berners-Lee built a computer with a soldering iron, TTL gates, an M6800 processor and an old television. During his time at university, he was caught hacking with a friend and was subsequently banned from using the university computer. He graduated in 1976 with a degree in physics.

He met his first wife Jane while at Oxford and they married soon after they started work in Poole. After graduation, Berners-Lee was employed at Plessey Controls Limited in Poole as a programmer. Jane also worked at Plessey Telecommunications Limited in Poole. In 1978, he worked at D.G. Nash Limited (also in Poole) where he wrote typesetting software and an operating system.

World Wide Web

While an independent contractor at CERN from June to December 1980, Berners-Lee proposed a project based on the concept of hypertext, to facilitate sharing and updating information among researchers.^[1] While there, he built a prototype system named ENQUIRE.

After leaving CERN, in 1980, he went to work at John Poole's Image Computer Systems Ltd., he returned in 1984 as a fellow. In 1989, CERN was the largest Internet node in Europe, and Berners-Lee saw an opportunity to join hypertext with the Internet: "I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the TCP and DNS ideas and — ta-da! — the World Wide Web."^[2] He wrote his initial proposal in March of 1989, and in 1990, with the help of Robert Cailliau, produced a revision which was accepted by his manager, Mike Sendall. He used similar ideas to those underlying the Enquire system to create the World Wide Web, for which he designed and built the first web browser and editor (called WorldWideWeb and developed on NEXTSTEP) and the first Web server called httpd (short for HyperText Transfer Protocol daemon).

The first Web site built was at CERN^[3][4][5][6] 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 and how to set up a Web server. It was also the world's first Web directory, since Berners-Lee maintained a list of other Web sites apart from his own.

In 1994, Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It comprised various companies that were willing to create standards and recommendations to improve the quality of the Web. In December 2004 he accepted a chair in Computer Science at the School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, UK, where he will be working on his new project — the Semantic Web.^[7]

Berners-Lee made 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.^[8]

Weaving the Web

In Berners-Lee's book, Weaving the Web, several recurring themes are apparent:

• It is just as important to be able to edit the Web as browse it. Wikis are a step in this direction, although Berners-Lee considers them merely a shadow of the WYSIWYG functionality of his first browser.
• Computers can be used for background tasks that enable humans to work better in groups.
• Every aspect of the Internet should function as a Web, rather than a hierarchy. Notable current exceptions are the Domain Name System and the domain naming rules managed by ICANN.
• Computer scientists have a moral responsibility as well as a technical responsibility.

Recognition

• The University of Southampton was the first to recognise Berners-Lee's contribution to developing the World Wide Web with an honorary degree in 1996 and he currently holds a Chair of Computer Science in the School of Electronics and Computer Science. He was the first holder of the 3Com Founders Chair at MIT, and is also now a Senior Research Scientist there. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society, an Honorary Fellow of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
• In 1997 he was made an Officer in the Order of the British Empire, became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2001, and received the Japan Prize in 2002. In 2002 he received the Principe de Asturias award in the category of Scientific and Technical Research. He shared the prize with Lawrence Roberts, Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf. Also in 2002, the British public named him among the 100 Greatest Britons of all time, according to a BBC poll spanning the entire history of the nation and he was awarded the Telluride Tech Festival Award of Technology in Telluride, Colorado.
• In May 2006 he was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
• On April 15, 2004 he was named as the first recipient of Finland's Millennium Technology Prize for inventing the World Wide Web. The cash prize, worth one million euros (about £663,000 or USD$1.2 million), was awarded on June 15, in Helsinki, Finland by President of the Republic of Finland, Tarja Halonen.^[9]

• He was given the rank of Knight Commander (the second-highest rank in the Order of the British Empire) by Queen Elizabeth II as part of the New Year's Honours on July 16, 2004.^[10][11]
• On July 21, 2004 he was presented with the degree of Doctor of Science (honoris causa) from Lancaster University.^[12]
• On January 27, 2005 he was named Greatest Briton of 2004 for his achievements as well as displaying the key British characteristics of "diffidence, determination, a sharp sense of humour and adaptability" as put by David Hempleman-Adams, a panel member.^[13] Time Magazine included Berners-Lee in its list of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century, published in 1999.
• On January 8, 2007 it was announced that he will be awarded the 2007 Charles Stark Draper Prize. The prize includes a $500,000 award and is founded in honor of Charles Stark Draper.
• On January 14, 2007, he was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering.

Current life

In 2001, he became a patron of the East Dorset Heritage Trust having previously lived in Colehill in Wimborne, East Dorset, England.

He is now living in Lexington, Massachusetts (USA) with his wife and two children.

As for religion, he left the Church of England, a religion in which he had been brought up, as a teenager just after being "confirmed" because he could not "believe in all kinds of unbelievable things." He and his family eventually found a Unitarian Universalist church while they were living in Boston. He appreciates Unitarian Universalism and hence settled in it.^[14]

He has become one of the leading voices in favour of Net Neutrality.^[15]

Works

• Berners-Lee, Tim; Mark Fischetti (1999). Weaving the Web: Origins and Future of the World Wide Web. Britain: Orion Business. ISBN 0-7528-2090-7. 

See also

• History of the World Wide Web
• Semantic Web

Footnotes

References

• Tim Berners-Lee and the Development of the World Wide Web (Unlocking the Secrets of Science) Ann Gaines (Mitchell Lane Publishers, 2001) ISBN 1-58415-096-3
• Tim Berners-Lee: Inventor of the World Wide Web (Ferguson's Career Biographies) Melissa Stewart (Ferguson Publishing Company, 2001) ISBN 0-89434-367-X children's biography
• How the Web was Born: The Story of the World Wide Web Robert Cailliau, James Gillies, R. Cailliau (Oxford University Press, 2000) ISBN 0-19-286207-3
• Profile of Tim Berners-Lee – patron of East Dorset Heritage Trust
• School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton
• Audio interview - 2005-11-19
• BBC2 Newsnight – Video interview clip of Berners-Lee on the read/write Web
• Technology Review interview
• Audio interview by Christopher Lydon

Fischetti, Mark. Weaving the Web. Harper Collins Publishers,1999. ISBN:0-06-251586-1(cloth). ISBN:0-06-251587-X(paper).

External links

• Berners-Lee's home page
• Berners-Lee's blog
• Berners-Lee's book Weaving The Web which details his views on the history and future of the Web.
• His High-School Picture
• An earlier post to comp.archives concerning the WorldWideWeb
• Tim Berners-Lee at the Notable Names Database
• Berners-Lee talk entited "The Future Of The Web" given at the Oxford internet institute High resolution MP4 Low Resolution MP4 Slides for the talk
• Video Interview with Tim Berners-Lee on Semantic Web at ISWC 2006 conference
• Tim Berners-Lee considers new TLD's harmful
• Tim Berners-Lee on the Future of the Web at Princeton -- April 2006
• Annotated version of Tim Berners-Lee on the Future of the Web
• developerWorks Interviews: Tim Berners-Lee (podcast/audio plus transcript)
• Real interaction between Tim and students that answer important www questions The VisionQuest Series: Meet the Man Who Spun the Web - Tim Berners-Lee (video - click watch the webcast) -- Nov 2000
• The father of the web is wrong to worry about his offspring Article on Sir Tim Berners-Lee's concerns about the World Wide Web
• Sir Timothy Berners-Lee KBE,FRS,FREng.Longer Biography
• Tim Berners-Lee list of scientific publications (1992-2006)

Persondata
NAME	Berners-Lee, Tim
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Berners-Lee, Sir Timothy; Berners-Lee, Timothy, TimBL, TBL
SHORT DESCRIPTION	inventor of World Wide Web
DATE OF BIRTH	June 8, 1955
PLACE OF BIRTH	London, United Kingdom
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH