27/08/2010

Tim Berners-Lee, or to use his full name, Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee, is a knight of the realm in the United Kingdom. He was awarded the honour for being the man attributed as the inventor of the World Wide Web. Berners-Lee was born in London on the eighth of June, in the year 1955. He studied Physics at Oxford University in the nineteen seventies.

It was while he was working at CERN that he proposed a document system which contained the concept of "hypertext". It took nearly a decade between his proposed hypertext system and it's implementation on the Internet. This was facilitated by the fact that CERN had become the major Internet node for Europe in the proceeding decade.

The challenge that Berners-Lee was faced with was connecting his hypertext system to the existing TCP and DNS systems. The reason Berners-Lee proposed his hypertext system, was because he thought it would enable information to be more easily shared across the Internet. Berners-Lee was assisted by Robert Cailliau, to get his proposal rubber stamped by his managers at CERN.

Berners-Lee was eventually successful in connecting a HTTP server and client to the Internet. The browser he developed was named 'WorldWideWeb'. The first Web server was hosted on a NeXT computer. The first web page was developed by Berners-Lee, and was hosted on the below address,

All of the above was achieved by Berners-Lee between 1989-1992. After that date Berners-Lee left CERN and became a professor at MIT 'Massachusetts Institute of Technology'. In 1994, at MIT, he founded the 'World Wide Web Consortium' (W3C). He is still the director of the W3C. It is the job of the W3C to oversee the continued development of the World Wide Web