Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee (born 8 June 1955), also known as Tim Berners-Lee, is an English computer scientist, best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. Tim Berners-Lee is the inventor of the World Wide Web. He is a British computer scientist who has also worked on developing the Semantic Web.
He is the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a global standards organization. He is a senior researcher and holder of the Founders Chair at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. In 1989, Berners-Lee proposed to his boss, Mike Sendall, that the world needed a communication system that would allow people to share information across different computers. Called the World Wide Web, it entailed a number of new technologies that allowed computers to access information from servers all across the Internet. Berners-Lee wrote his proposal in March 1989 and named it ENQUIRE after a Victorian directory of households. In 1990, he implemented the first successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and a server via the Internet.
In 1994, Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to coordinate future development of the World Wide Web. In 2001 he co-founded the World Wide Web Foundation and in 2009 was appointed a Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. He is a director of The Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI), and a member of the advisory board of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. In 2004, Berners-Lee was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his pioneering work. In April 2009, he was elected as an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society (HonFRS). He has received numerous other awards and honors.
Early in his career, Berners-Lee worked at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), where he had proposed a project using hypertext to facilitate sharing information among researchers. The first server outside Europe was installed at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in Palo Alto, California; it became operational on 6 August 1991. In 1994, he oversaw funding for the first European web servers at CERN.
Both CERN and Fermilab tried to transfer responsibility for the World Wide Web to the academic community. However, CERN had little authority on the emerging web outside of Europe, while Fermilab was not actively involved with any browser development. A high-level committee within the US federal government, chaired by Dan Gillmor, recommended in December 1994 that the National Science Foundation (NSF) should take on this responsibility. In August 1995, the NSFNET ceased to be a federally funded project, and became a private network operated by Merit Network, Inc.
In 2001, Berners-Lee convinced his boss at CERN, Robert Cailliau, to establish a small innovation team, and is responsible for the W3C and its World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Berners-Lee became the first director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which oversees the Web's continued development. When HTML was first proposed, there was not a formal standards process for the World Wide Web; each browser developed its own variations.
Berners-Lee advocated that new server software adopt support for existing standards, and he collaborated with browser developers to make this possible. But it proved difficult for all parties to coordinate their efforts because they were unsure of who would control the new standards. Berners-Lee decided that, rather than keep the developers' "hands tied," they should cooperate and combine their efforts. He brought developers together in a series of face-to-face meetings to set common standards for a single, unified web protocol—httpd.
On December 3, 1994, the first meeting of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) took place in Boston, Massachusetts. The W3C was founded to develop common protocols that would make the web work consistently across different platforms and browsers. Berners-Lee served as its first In 2001, he co-founded the World Wide Web Foundation to promote the web's potential to improve social and economic equality around the world. In 2009, he was appointed a Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, where he continued work on the Semantic Web and its implications for society.
In 2012, he was awarded the prestigious Millennium Technology Prize by the Technology Academy Finland "for his invention of the World Wide Web, and for subsequent work in championing its potential as a tool to improve global communications and understanding. He has also received honorary degrees from universities around the world, including Cambridge, Oxford, Brown, Notre Dame, McGill, and Northeastern. In 2012, Berners-Lee received the prestigious Millennium Technology Prize along with Wendy Hall, his colleague at the University of Southampton. This prize was awarded for "inventing the World Wide Web, the first web browser (Mosaic) and editor/browser (HTML)".
In 2013 Berners-Lee delivered a keynote speech at the 20th International World Wide Web Conference in Sydney, Australia, in which he called for a "Magna Carta for the web" to protect the rights of Internet users. The following year he published an open letter to mark the 25th anniversary of the Web, in which he outlined his concerns that the web was becoming more and more controlled by a small number of large corporations.
In 2014, Berners-Lee was honored with a Princess of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research. As of 2017, he is one of ten University College London alumni to win a Nobel Prize; the other nine are (in chronological order of achievement): Alexander Fleming, Ernst Boris Chain, Alexander R. Todd, John Kendrew, Max Perutz, Francis Crick and James D. Watson (co-discoverrs of the structure of the DNA molecule), Peter Higgs and Harold Pinter.In May 2017 Berners-Lee launched a project to develop a decentralised web through which internet users can maintain control of their data and the content they create, rather than rely on large corporations such as Google or Facebook.
In June 2018 he announced Solid, an open source personal online data store (PODS) for storing your own data in a secure way. He is currently working with The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA, and the University of Oxford, UK, to develop it further. In 2009 he criticized both current web monopolies like Facebook as well as the potential for increased regulation that could harm creativity and innovation. In 2010 he expressed his concerns to the European Union over their proposed "cookie law" which would require websites to gain consent from users before storing any information on their computers as well as request permission for every single use.
Tim Berners-Lee is one of the most important people in the history of the Internet and, more broadly, computer science. He has made significant contributions to Web accessibility, standards development, and the promotion of free and open source software. He is a true pioneer in information technology and continues to work tirelessly to ensure that the Web fulfills its potential as a tool for global communication and understanding. His work on the decentralised web is sure to have a lasting impact on the history of computing and the Internet.
Today, the world wide web is an essential part of our lives. We use it to communicate with friends and family, to find out about our communities and the world. We use it to learn, listen to music, watch videos and read the news. We can buy products, download music and books. And this is just a small part of what's possible with the web! Berners- Lee's proposal wasn't simply an idea - it was the beginning of a movement. In the years since its inception, the web has continued to grow and evolve, thanks to the work of people around the world who have dedicated their time and energy to making it better.
Tim Berners Lee, known as the father of the internet, is currently Chairman of the W3C. He is a professor of computer science at MIT and Oxford University.
