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'''"Sir" Tim Berners-Lee, is the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium, Senior Researcher at MIT's CSAIL, and Professor of Computer Science at Southampton ECS.'''
'''"Sir" Tim Berners-Lee, is the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium, Senior Researcher at MIT's CSAIL, and Professor of Computer Science at Southampton ECS.'''


Photo link: http://topheblog.club-blog.fr/weblog/images/tbl.jpg


=Bio=
=Bio=
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Before coming to CERN, Tim worked with Image Computer Systems, of Ferndown, Dorset, England and before that as a principal engineer with Plessey Telecommunications, in Poole, England."
Before coming to CERN, Tim worked with Image Computer Systems, of Ferndown, Dorset, England and before that as a principal engineer with Plessey Telecommunications, in Poole, England."
(http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/)
(http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/)
'''Tim Berners-Lee'''
Sir Tim Berners-LeeSir Timothy "Tim" John Berners-Lee, KBE, FRS (TimBL or TBL) (born June 8, 1955 in London) is the inventor of the World Wide Web and director of the World Wide Web Consortium, which oversees its continued development.
'''Background and early career'''
Berners-Lee was born in London, England, the son of Conway Berners-Lee and Mary Lee Woods. His parents, who were both mathematicians, were employed together on the team that built the Manchester Mark I, one of the earliest computers. Berners-Lee attended Sheen Mount Primary School (who have dedicated a new hall in his honour) before moving on to Emanuel School in Wandsworth. He is an alumnus of Queen's College, Oxford University, where he built a computer with a soldering iron, TTL gates, an M6800 processor and an old television. While at Oxford, he was caught hacking with a friend and was subsequently banned from using the university computer.
He worked at Plessey Telecommunications Limited in 1976 as a programmer, and in 1978, he worked at the D.G. Nash Limited where he did typesetting software and an operating system. 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 the Boston, Massachusetts area (USA) with his wife and two children.
'''World Wide Web'''
This NeXTcube was used by Berners-Lee at CERN and became the first Web server.In 1980, 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. With help from Robert Cailliau he built a prototype system named Enquire.
After leaving CERN in 1980 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. In his words, "I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the TCP and DNS ideas and — ta-da! — the World Wide Web" [1]. 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 http://info.cern.ch/ [2] 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 willing to create standards and recommendations to improve the quality of the Internet. Many of the World Wide Web Consortium's achievements are able to be seen in many Web sites on the Internet. In 1996, in conjunction with Håkon Wium Lie, the W3C announced a standard entitled Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). It was not until 2000 and 2001 that popular browsers began to support this standard, which shows Berners-Lee's first goal to maintain the freedom of the Web. In December 2004 he accepted a chair (AKA professorship) in Computer Science at the School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, UK. He will be working closely with the University on the Semantic Web — his new project. To this day, Tim Berners-Lee maintains a low profile, not intent on gaining popular status.
While the component ideas of the World Wide Web are still simple, Berners-Lee's insight was to combine them in a way which is still discovering its full potential. Perhaps his greatest single contribution, though, was to make 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. [3]
'''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. (Wiki is a step in this direction, although Berners-Lee considers it 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 is currently a Chair of Computer Science at the University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science department. 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.
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. 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. [4]
On July 21, 2004 he was presented with an Honorary Doctor of Science (honoris causa) from Lancaster University. [5] On January 27, 2005 he was named Greatest Briton of 2004 for his achievements as well as displaying the key English characteristics of "diffidence, determination, a sharp sense of humour and adaptability" as put by David Hempleman-Adams, a panel member. [6]Time Magazine included Berners-Lee in its list of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century, published in 1999.
'''Works'''
Weaving the Web: Origins and Future of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee (with Mark Fischetti) (Texere Publishing, 1999) ISBN 0752820907
URL = http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/




=More Information=
=More Information=


There is an expanded profile at http://www.answers.com/Berners-Lee%2C%20Tim


See the streaming video with [[Tim Berners-Lee on the Future of the Web]]
See the streaming video with [[Tim Berners-Lee on the Future of the Web]]
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Weaving the Web by Tim Berners-Lee with Mark Fischetti, (Harper San Francisco; Paperback: ISBN:006251587X, Abridged audio cassette abridged ISBN:0694521256) and various other languages. 1997.
Weaving the Web by Tim Berners-Lee with Mark Fischetti, (Harper San Francisco; Paperback: ISBN:006251587X, Abridged audio cassette abridged ISBN:0694521256) and various other languages. 1997.


[[Category:Individuals]]
URL = http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/
 
[[Category:Bios]]

Latest revision as of 17:38, 4 January 2016

"Sir" Tim Berners-Lee, is the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium, Senior Researcher at MIT's CSAIL, and Professor of Computer Science at Southampton ECS.

Photo link: http://topheblog.club-blog.fr/weblog/images/tbl.jpg

Bio

"A graduate of Oxford University, England, Tim now holds the 3Com Founders chair at the Laboratory for Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL)at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He directs the World Wide Web Consortium, an open forum of companies and organizations with the mission to lead the Web to its full potential.

With a background of system design in real-time communications and text processing software development, in 1989 he invented the World Wide Web, an internet-based hypermedia initiative for global information sharing. while working at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory. He wrote the first web client (browser-editor) and server in 1990.

Before coming to CERN, Tim worked with Image Computer Systems, of Ferndown, Dorset, England and before that as a principal engineer with Plessey Telecommunications, in Poole, England." (http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/)


More Information

There is an expanded profile at http://www.answers.com/Berners-Lee%2C%20Tim

See the streaming video with Tim Berners-Lee on the Future of the Web


Key Book to Read

Weaving the Web by Tim Berners-Lee with Mark Fischetti, (Harper San Francisco; Paperback: ISBN:006251587X, Abridged audio cassette abridged ISBN:0694521256) and various other languages. 1997.

URL = http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/