Berners-Lee Timothy John

Timothy John Berners-Lee

Berners-Lee Timothy John is a British scientist. Introduced the concept of World Wide Web in 1991. Since 1994, he has been the head of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Since 1994, he has also been a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and since 2004, a professor at the University of Southampton. He heads the World Wide Web Foundation.

Born June 8, 1985 in London (UK)

Biography, career

Parents, father Conway Berners-Lee and mother Mary Lee Woods were mathematicians-programmers: at Manchester University, they worked together to create Manchester Mark I, the first commercial electronic computer with RAM. As a child, Berners-Lee was fond of drawing on computer punch cards and assembled toy computers from cardboard boxes

From 1969 to 1973, Berners-Lee studied at the prestigious private Emanuel School. He was fond of design and mathematics, but at the Royal College of Oxford University (Oxford University's Queen's College), where he entered in 1973, decided to study physics. In Oxford, Berners-Lee's new hobby was computers: he independently soldered his first computer based on a Motorola M6800 processor and a simple TV as a monitor. He was also fond of hacking and after Berners-Lee managed to hack into a university computer, he was forbidden to use it.

After graduating from Oxford University in 1976 with a bachelor's degree in physics with honors, Berners-Lee moved to Dorset and got a job at Plessey Corporation, where he was engaged in programming distributed transaction systems, information transmission systems, and also worked on barcode technology. In 1978, he moved to D.G Nash Ltd, where he created programs for printers and multitasking systems. In 1980, Berners-Lee worked as a software consultant in Switzerland, at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). There, in his spare time, he wrote the Enquire program, which used hypertext to access documents: subsequently, its concept formed the basis of the World Wide Web. From 1981 to 1984, Berners-Lee worked at Image Computer Systems Ltd, was engaged in the architecture of real-time systems and graphic and communication software. In 1984, Berners-Lee took up scientific activities at CERN: he developed real-time systems for collecting scientific information, as well as computer applications for particle accelerators and other scientific equipment.

In March, 1989 Berners-Li for the first time offered the management of the division of CERN the idea of World Wide Web ("World wide web", this term was thought up by him). The basis was the Enquire program: the idea was to exchange scientific information on hypertext web pages using the TCP/IP data transfer protocol. Until 1988, this protocol was used in the US military network ARPANET, the predecessor of the Internet, and in the university network NSFNET, and by 1989 it began to be used for commercial purposes, in particular, for mail exchange, reading news groups and real-time communication. The idea proposed by Berners-Lee liked his head, Mike Sandall, but he did not allocate any large funds and proposed to experiment on one personal computer of NeXT. On it, Berners-Lee wrote the first ever CERN DAILYd web server and the first WorldWideWeb web browser and page editor. He also developed the HTTP application layer protocol, the HTML language, and a standardized method for writing a site address on the Internet - URL. In 1990, the Belgian Robert Cailliau joined the Berners-Lee project. He secured funding for the project and dealt with organizational problems.

Work on the basic standards of the invention was completed in May 1991, and on August 6, 1991, Berners-Lee in the news group alt.hypertext first announced the creation of the World Wide Web and gave a link to the first website on the Internet, which talked about technology, and subsequently a catalog of other sites. In 1993, thanks to the efforts of Cayo and the consent of CERN, Berners-Lee transferred the entire World Wide Web concept to the public domain, leaving no right to charge for the use of his invention. The creation of browsers for various operating systems, including Mosaic and Netscape for, Microsoft Windows gave impetus to the development of the World Wide Web and an increase in its share in total Internet traffic. It is noteworthy that a possible alternative to the "World Wide Web" could be the Gopher protocol, developed a few years before by the University of Minnesota, however, according to Berners-Lee, Gopher could not withstand competition with WWW due to the fact that, unlike CERN, the creators of the protocol demanded money for its implementation.

Thus, the creation of the World Wide Web is usually attributed to Berners-Lee and, to a lesser extent, Kayo. Sometimes Berners-Lee is mistakenly called the "creator of the Internet," although he was the creator of only one of the elements of the world network, without which, however, the Internet could remain a network for the military and scientists.

In 1994, Berners-Lee left CERN with the idea of ​ ​ founding a company to develop a new browser, but instead went to work as a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the Computer Science Laboratory, which began to develop standards. The goal of the organization was to fully unlock the potential of the World Wide Web, as well as ensure its future development.

In 2004, Berners-Lee became a professor and chairman of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Southampton. Together with MIT and the University of Southampton, he founded and became one of the leaders of the Web Science Research Initiative, which is engaged in attracting scientific personnel to study the development potential of the World Wide Web. In the same year, Berners-Lee was awarded the title of Knight of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain, and a year later he was awarded the British Order of Merit. In 2008, Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Foundation, which funds and coordinates spending on the development of the World Wide Web. Berners-Lee himself has repeatedly stated that the Internet is still at the very beginning of its development. He did not dwell on the creation of basic World Wide Web protocols. He called the future of the Internet "Semantic Web" (Semantic web), which will facilitate the machine processing of data on the network by arranging hosted information on the Internet: assigning universal resource identifiers (URIs) to all objects and the widespread use of metadata, tags and ontologies (simplified, metadata dictionaries), which will significantly simplify the search and work with information.

In 2001, Berners-Lee said that after a few years, the World Wide Web was evolving into the Semantic Web, but the process of evolution was delayed, and the Semantic Web concept itself was met with criticism: it was noted that the idea of ​ ​ the Semantic Web itself is flawed and unrealistic due to the human factor, experts expressed the opinion that the work on it is more important. Among the implemented proposals of Berners-Lee can be noted the emergence of websites that became possible not only to read, but also to edit online: Wikipedia and blogs became examples of such sites.

Berners-Lee, in an interview with The Telegraph, said that he did not regret that his invention had become popular among pornography distributors and fraudsters. However, according to him, he would like to change the structure of the World Wide Web so that it does not allow you to engage in spam mailings. It is noteworthy that at the end of 2008, Berners-Lee lost money when he bought a Christmas gift from an online store, becoming a victim of online scams.

Berners-Lee is the author of Weaving the Web, in which he talks about the history of the creation and future of the world network. In 1999, Time magazine included Berners-Lee among the 100 most significant people and 20 most significant thinkers of the 20th century. Berners-Lee is a member of the American Academy of Humanities and Exact Sciences and the Royal Society of London. In 2004, Berners-Lee became the first winner of the Finnish Millennium Technology Prize, receiving about 1 million euros as an award.

2021: Internet sold for $5.43 million.

Or more precisely, the creator of WWW sold in June 2021 NFT the source code of the Internet for $5.43 million at the Sotheby's auction.

Bidding began with $1000, buyers made 51 bets.

Tim Berners-Lee sold an NFT lot with access to files to view all 9,555 lines of WWW code, a letter "about the code and the process of its creation," a 30-minute animated code visualization and a "digital poster" with all the lines. The lot included HTML, HTTP, and URL.

There are timestamps in the files, when and how much of the code was written.

The auction took place a week from June 23 to June 30, the price per lot began at $1000 and eventually increased to $5 434,500. The price increased by $1 million over the past one and a half hours.

The money from the sale of the lot will go to "initiatives supported by Tim Berners-Lee and his wife Rosemary Leith."

Personal life

Berners-Lee was married twice. His first wife was called Jane, they met while studying at Oxford University, married immediately after his graduation and initially worked together at Plessey. Berners-Lee met his second wife, programmer Nancy Carlson, while working at CERN, they married in 1990 and raise two children together: daughter Alice and son Ben. As a child, Berners-Lee was baptized in the Church of England, but quickly abandoned this religion. After the invention of the World Wide Web, he became a parishioner of the Unitarian-Universalist Church.

Hobby

Berners-Lee loves to walk in nature, plays the piano and guitar.