In less than two decades, the Internet has become an integral part of the lives of millions of people, giving them the ability to instantly access information and communicate with anyone, anywhere, anytime. Developed by English software engineer Tim Berners-Lee, the Internet is a democratic resource that, in a sense, equalizes all inhabitants of the planet.

Hundreds of millions of people cannot imagine their existence without the Internet. Perhaps they could refuse to use the World Wide Web, but life without access to the network would seem less pleasant and comfortable to them. The Internet allows us to communicate, share ideas and knowledge with each other in real time, without having to think about distance, different time zones and social inequality.

Designed by software engineer Tim Berners-Lee information network, programmed to allow computers to replicate some of the intuitive abilities of the human brain, is a remarkable achievement in its own right. But Berners-Lee worked to make his invention unconditionally accessible to everyone.

Berners-Lee was born in London in 1955. His parents are mathematicians Conway Berners-Lee and Mary Lee Woods, who worked on the creation of the first computer. By the time Tim entered Oxford College in 1973, he had already become famous as a great inventor.

He built his first computer using materials and tools such as a homemade soldering iron, an M6800 processor, and parts from an old TV. It even happened that Tim and his friend were caught hacking and using the university computer forbidden.

After graduating from university, Tim worked for a telecommunications equipment company and then for various organizations as a freelance software development and maintenance engineer.
His main goal was to find a way to unite computing power a computer with the intuitive properties of the human brain.

Over the next three years, Berners-Lee and his colleagues improved the Internet sites and convinced other people to actively visit them. From the very beginning, he gave up the right to patent an Internet service and make money from its use by non-profit structures.

By 1994, traffic to the resource he created, https://info.cern.ch, reached a level that was a thousand times higher than that of the previous three years. It was then that scientists, Tim's associates, first used a search engine, which marked the beginning of a new stage in the development of the industry information technologies.

Innovators. How a few geniuses, hackers and geeks created a digital revolution Isaacson Walter

Tim Berners-Lee

Tim Berners-Lee

Berners-Lee grew up on the outskirts of London in the 1960s. Even then, he realized one fundamental thing: computers are great at processing programs, step by step, but they have difficulty finding associations and non-obvious relationships between something, that is, performing the functions of human imagination.

I can’t say that every child thinks about such things, but Tim’s parents were computer scientists. They wrote programs in Ferranti Mark I, which was a commercial version of the computer with permanent memory, created by the University of Manchester. One day, his father was preparing a speech on how to develop computer intuition, and at the same time told his son what he had read in books about the human brain. Berners-Lee remembered one idea: “Computers would become much more efficient if they could be programmed to find connections between data that at first glance have nothing in common.” They also discussed the concept universal machine Turing, and Berners-Lee realized that the capabilities of a computer are limited only by our imagination.

Berners-Lee was born in 1955, the same year as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. He considered himself lucky to have become interested in electronics during those years. Back then, children had no trouble getting hold of basic parts and simple devices to experiment with: “Everything happened at the right time. As soon as we figured out one invention, something more progressive appeared on the market, and we just had enough pocket money for it.”

IN primary school Berners-Lee and his friend often visited a hobby store where they spent all their money on electromagnets and then assembled relays or switches from them. They installed a magnet on a piece of wood, then turned it on, the magnet attracted something tin, and the circuit closed. This is how they understood what a bit is, how to store it, and what can be done with contours. Once they had played enough with electromagnetic switches, transistors became so affordable that friends could easily buy a hundred or two. “We learned how to test transistors and replace our old relays with them.” They compared new technologies with conventional electromagnetic switches - it was so easy to understand what each component was responsible for. Using transistors, Berners-Lee made sound signals for his toy railway and several circuits that slowed the train down.

“We started coming up with complex logic, but it was difficult to assemble them, you had to use a lot of transistors,” says Berners-Lee. However, soon microcircuits appeared in all electronics stores, and the problem solved itself. “My pocket money was enough to buy a whole package of chips, and I suddenly realized that I could assemble the basic components of a computer.” And not only to assemble, but also to understand how these machines worked, because he knew how everything worked, from switches to transistors and microcircuits.

In the summer before starting his studies at Oxford, Berners-Lee worked part-time at a sawmill. One day he was throwing sawdust into a trash can and saw an old electromechanical calculator with rows of buttons. He picked it up, connected it to switches and transistors and got simple computer. Berners-Lee bought a broken TV from a repair shop and figured out how its electronics worked. ray tube, and made a monitor for my device.

While he was studying at Oxford, microprocessors came onto the market. Like Wozniak and Jobs, Berners-Lee and his friends designed boards and tried to sell them. They failed to repeat the success of the two Steves. Berners-Lee would later name one of the reasons: “We didn’t have an advanced community, progressive cultural movements, or a ‘Home Computer Club’ like in Silicon Valley.” Innovations develop where all the conditions for this are in place. And in the 1970s, such a place was San Francisco and its environs, but not Oxfordshire in England.

Berners-Lee studied new technologies in a practical way and eventually became well versed in electronics, knowing everything from electromagnetic switches to microprocessors. “If you've already tinkered with wires and nails and then find out there's a relay in a circuit or circuit, you don't panic because you know how to build one yourself,” Berners-Lee shares. - Now young people buy MacBook and sees it as an ordinary electrical appliance, treats it like a refrigerator, hoping that inside there is only the best. But no one knows how it works. And no one fully understands what is obvious to me and my parents: the capabilities of a computer are limited only by our imagination.”

Berners-Lee's second vivid childhood memory was of a Victorian reference almanac with a charming and old-fashioned title. - “Here you can read about everything in the world,” which was kept in their home. The introduction said: “If you want to make flowers out of wax, learn the rules of etiquette, prepare an appetizer for breakfast or dinner, plan a menu for a large or small dinner party, cure a headache, make a will, get married, organize a funeral - in general, whatever you want to do around the house or just for the joy of yourself and those around you, I hope you will find here necessary advice". It was a kind of “Whole Earth Catalog” of the 19th century, which presented a mass various information, at the same time well systematized. On title page everyone was encouraged to use the index at the end of the book. By 1894, the directory had been reprinted 89 times and sold 1,188,000 copies. “The book served as a kind of portal that opened access to information. It contained everything from ways to remove stains from clothes to tips on investing money, recalls Berners-Lee. “You can’t call it an analogue of the World Wide Web, but it’s quite a predecessor or a starting point.”

Since childhood, Berners-Lee has been concerned about another question: how the human brain builds random associations. For example, why, when you smell coffee, do you remember the dress your friend was wearing the last time you had coffee with her? A computer can only see what it is programmed to see. Berners-Lee was also interested in how people work together: “You know half the solution, and I know the other half. If we are sitting at the same table, I can start a sentence and you finish it, so we spend brainstorming. Or we write everything on the board and edit each other's ideas. But how can we do this if we are not in the same room?”

After graduating from Oxford, all these thoughts haunted Berners-Lee: the Victorian reference book, the human brain and random associations, issues of cooperation. Later, he will understand that new ideas and innovations arise where many unrelated concepts are intertwined, which then merge into one. Berners-Lee described the process this way: “You have half-formed ideas drifting around in your head. They appear from different places, and the brain somehow miraculously sorts them until one day they form a single picture. It happens that the parts of the mosaic don’t fit together perfectly, and then you’re riding a bike, for example, and suddenly you figure out how to do it better.”

Berners-Lee's disparate ideas began to coalesce into a complete solution while he was working as a consultant at CERN, the particle physics laboratory near Geneva where the Large Hadron Collider is built. He needed to record the entire process of interaction between ten thousand researchers, register data from their computers for all projects. Computers and people communicated on different languages and referred to each other haphazardly, and Berners-Lee had to register it all. He decided to write a program that would make his life easier. He noticed that when CERN employees explain to him the structure of the laboratory's various projects, many draw diagrams with many arrows. Berners-Lee used this in his program: he entered the name of a person or the name of a project and linked together those that were related. My computer program he named it after a Victorian almanac from his childhood: Enquire.

"I liked Enquire, because the information in it was stored unstructured, without matrices or trees,” says Berners-Lee. Such hierarchical models are clumsy, while the human mind is prone to unexpected actions. While Berners-Lee was writing his program, he came up with a truly grand application for it. “Imagine that the information stored on all computers in the world is interconnected and forms a global information space. A unified information network will be created." He didn't know it yet, but he had actually described Vanevar Bush's memex system, which could store documents, link them cross references and provide them to the user upon request. The only thing is that Berners-Lee thought more globally.

However, he resigned from CERN when Enquire was still in its infancy. His computer and an eight-inch floppy disk with the code remained in the laboratory, which were soon lost and the program was forgotten. Berners-Lee lived in England for several years, where he worked on software for working with documents. However, he became bored, applied for a CERN fellowship and returned to the laboratory in September 1984. His group was supposed to collect the results of all experiments carried out at the center.

CERN was a veritable melting pot, where people of many different nationalities worked on many different types of computers, resulting in dozens of languages, both human and computer, in use. At the same time, everyone needed to exchange information. “In its diversity, CERN was like a small model of the world,” recalls Berners-Lee. In this atmosphere, he again plunged into his childhood thoughts: even then he imagined how people of different beliefs worked together and thanks to this their raw thoughts turned into new ideas. “I’ve always been interested in watching how people interact. At various institutes and universities I observed a large number of people and noticed how they cooperate. If everyone was in the same room, ideas were written on the board. I wanted to invent a system that would make it easier for people to brainstorm and store all the information about a project."

He had the feeling that with the help similar system people could work at a distance, finish each other's sentences and complement ideas. “I dreamed of coming up with something that would help us interact and create together,” Berners-Lee shares. - It’s always interesting to take on a task that can only be solved collectively. For example, to find a cure for AIDS or understand the nature of cancer, it is necessary to summarize the knowledge and ideas of several people." Berners-Lee's goal was to allow people to brainstorm from different places, that is, to invent simple ways to collaborate remotely.

As a result, Berners-Lee remembered his program Enquire and began to think about how to expand its functionality. “I wanted her to be able to work with the most different documents, including scientific and technical articles, user manuals for various software, minutes of meetings, hastily and carelessly taken notes, and so on." In fact, he planned to do much more. In appearance, like many programmers, he was a completely calm person, but in his soul he was still the same restless, curious boy who read until late Enquire Within Everything. He decided to create not just a data management system, but a kind of playground for collaboration: “I dreamed of a creative space, something like a sandbox where everyone could play together.”

Berners-Lee decided that he would link documents together using hypertext, a seemingly fairly simple solution. Nowadays, everyone who uses the Internet knows that hypertext is a word or phrase that can be clicked on and taken to another document or other content. By describing Memex, Bush anticipated the emergence of such technology. The word “hypertext” was coined by techno-prophet Ted Nelson in 1963. He never realized his magnificent project Xanadu, in which it was supposed to combine all texts and documents with bidirectional hypertext links.

The Berners-Lee program was supposed to work on the basis of such links, and thanks to hypertext, anyone could create them in unlimited quantities, without obtaining permissions and regardless of what operating system he works. "What Enquire supported hypertext links, gave us incredible freedom. It was possible to connect computers into new networks,” Berners-Lee exulted. At the same time, it became possible to build a network without a central node and a coordinating center. If you knew the web address of the document, you could simply link to it. Such a system of links could grow and develop indefinitely, “taking advantage of the benefits of the Internet,” as Berners-Lee called it. Once again, innovation came about by merging two existing technologies, in this case hypertext and the Internet.

Berners-Lee used a computer NeXT, nice hybrid workstation and personal computer, created by Jobs after he was forced to leave Apple. With help NeXT Berners-Lee developed remote procedure call technology - Remote Procedure Call, allowing a computer to request that a procedure be executed on another computer. After that, he drew up rules for naming each document, that is, assigning a universal identification code for the document - Universal Document Identifier. However, Internet Engineering Council staff - Internet Engineering Task Force, responsible for approving network standards, did not allow the use of the word “universal”, seeing it as arrogance. Berners-Lee agreed to the word "united" - uniform. However, he was forced to change the name entirely. This is how the familiar ones appeared URL, uniform resource locators - Uniform Resource Locators for example: http://www.cern.ch. By the end of 1990, he had developed a set of tools to build his network: the Hypertext Transfer Protocol HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) for exchanging hypertext over the Internet, hypertext markup language HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) to create web pages, simple browser, which could receive and display data, and an application that ran on the server side and responded to requests received over the network.

In March 1989, Berners-Lee was ready to present his developments to CERN top managers and hoped to receive funding. “I wanted to create a single information space that we could develop and expand,” he wrote. - Documents combined into single network using links, this is a much more advantageous structure than a regular hierarchical tree." Unfortunately, his project was received with enthusiasm and bewilderment at the same time. “Very vague, but interesting,” his boss, Mike Sendal, wrote to himself. “I read Tim's proposal and still didn't understand what exactly he was planning to do, but it was a great idea.” As has happened before, to implement his idea, the brilliant inventor needed an assistant.

Typically innovative digital technologies were the result of collective work, and the concept of the World Wide Web was developed by only one person. However, Berners-Lee also needed help. Robert Caillot, a Belgian engineer at CERN who was interested in similar ideas and was ready to join forces, came to his rescue. “Robert became the best man at the wedding of hypertext and the Internet,” Berners-Lee joked.

Cayo had the right combination of courtesy and business skills, so he handled the CERN projects just as well as any other project. A fastidious dandy, he even went to get his hair cut on schedule. According to Berners-Lee, he was one of those engineers who could be infuriated by what different countries different sockets. Their tandem was formed according to a model that was often encountered in the world of innovation: a designer-visionary rich in ideas and a competent manager. Caio loved to plan and organize everything, so he took over the project and told Berners-Lee to “get into the bits and write the software.” One day, Kayo tried to explain the plan for their project to Berners-Lee and was extremely surprised: “He didn’t even understand the basics!” Thanks to Kayo, he didn't need to understand them.

The first thing Caillot took on was the economic justification for the project, which Berners-Lee submitted to CERN managers. It was necessary to describe everything more clearly, but as intriguingly as it was. He started with the title “Information Management.” Kayo insisted that the project needed a catchier name, and believed that coming up with one would not be difficult. Berners-Lee had several ideas. Firstly, “A treasure trove of information”, Mine of Information, which was shortened to MOI,"me" or "me" in French. Quite self-centered. The second name on the list was The Information Mine,"Information Mine", but its abbreviation would be T.I.M. which smacked even more of narcissism. Caio also refused to take the name of a Greek god or an Egyptian pharaoh, as was often done at CERN. Berners-Lee then suggested an obvious and descriptive title World Wide Web- The World Wide Web. He used this metaphor in his first presentation. Kayo protested: “This option is no good, because the abbreviation WWW sounds longer than the name itself!” This reduction was really three syllables longer than the title. However, Berners-Lee knew how to calmly and persistently get his way. “That sounds good,” he persisted. In the end they settled on: "WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a project on hypertext." So World Wide Web got its name.

The project was approved at CERN, and the question arose about patenting the developments. Berners-Lee objected. He believed that free access to the network would allow it to develop quickly. One day he looked into Kayo’s eyes and asked reproachfully: “Robert, do you want to be rich?” Kayo reacted without thinking: “Well, it’s easier to live this way, no?” This was the wrong answer. He realized that Berners-Lee was not interested in profit: “Tim wasn’t in it for the money. He didn't need the hotel rooms and amenities that are usually provided general directors» .

Berners-Lee continued to insist that his web protocols should be made public and distributed free of charge. After all, he created this network to make it easier to collaborate and share information. CERN issued a white paper renouncing intellectual property rights to software code, source and binary. Every person was allowed to use, copy, modify and distribute it. CERN collaborated with Richard Stallman and switched to his General Public License GNU. Thus was born one of the most ambitious open-source projects source code in history.

Stallman's ideas suited the modest Berners-Lee. He abhorred any thought of personal aggrandizement, which stemmed from his deepest convictions: respect among colleagues and the free exchange of knowledge and experience were part of his morality. He joined the Unitarian Universalist Church because he saw that Unitarians shared his values: “They meet in churches instead of modern hotels and talk about justice, peace, conflict and morality, not about protocols and data formats, but they have the Engineering Council Internet has a similar understanding of mutual respect between participants... In designing the Internet and the World Wide Web, we are developing principles that will allow computers to work in harmony, and it is our moral and social duty to come up with a set of rules that will allow people to work in harmony too.”

Despite the excitement that was often created about the release of new products - here you can remember Bell Labs and their transistor or Steve Jobs with his computer Macintosh,- the most important innovations often tiptoed onto the world stage. On August 6, 1991, Berners-Lee was reading a newsgroup alt.hypertext on the Internet and saw the question: “Has anyone heard anything about research or development in the field of hypertext links, which make it possible to obtain data from several heterogeneous sources?” At 14:56 that day he replied from the address [email protected], thereby speaking publicly for the first time about new network: "Project WorldWideWeb is engaged in creating links that allow connecting any information located anywhere,” he wrote. - If you want to use my code, write to me."

The modest Berners-Lee himself did not realize how deep the idea he touched on in his even more modest message: any information anywhere.“I spent so much time giving people the opportunity to post absolutely any information online,” he will say twenty years later. “But I couldn’t even imagine that people would want to put literally everything there.” Yes, Enquire Within Everything- “Here you can read about everything in the world.”

1955

1976

IN 1978

WITH 1981 By 1984

IN 1984

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Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee is a famous British scientist, inventor of URI, URL, HTTP, HTML, inventor of the World Wide Web (with Robert Cayo) and current head of the World Wide Web Consortium. Author of the concept of the semantic web. Author of many other developments in the field of information technology.

Tim Berners-Lee was born on June 8 1955 year in London (England). His parents, Conway Berners-Lee and Mary Lee Woods, were both mathematicians and worked on the Manchester Mark I, one of the first computers. Tim attended Emanuel School in Wandsworth and then King's College, Oxford. There he built his first computer based on the M6800 processor with a TV instead of a monitor. One time Tim and his friend were caught carrying out hacker attack, for this they were deprived of the right to use university computers.

After graduating from Oxford University in 1976 Berners-Lee joined Plessey Telecommunications Ltd in Dorset. He worked there for two years, working mainly on distributed transaction systems.

IN 1978 In 2010, Berners-Lee moved to D.G Nash Ltd, where he worked on programs for printers and created a kind of multitasking operating system.

He then worked for a year and a half at the European Laboratory for Nuclear Research CERN (Geneva, Switzerland) as a consultant on software. It was there that he wrote the Enquire program for his own needs, which used random associations and laid the conceptual basis for the World Wide Web.

WITH 1981 By 1984 Tim Berners-Lee worked for Image Computer Systems Ltd as a systems architect for a year.

IN 1984 year, he received a fellowship at CERN and began developing distributed systems for collecting scientific data there. At this time, he worked on the FASTBUS system and developed his RPC system (English: Remote Procedure Call).

IN 1989 year, while working at CERN on the internal document exchange system ENQUIRE, Berners-Lee proposed the global hypertext project, now known as the World Wide Web. The project was approved and implemented.

WITH 1991 By 1993 Tim Berners-Lee continued to work on the World Wide Web for a year. He collected feedback from users and coordinated the work of the Web. Then he first proposed for wide discussion his first specifications of URI, HTTP and HTML.

IN 1994 Berners-Lee became the 3Com Founders Chair at the MIT Computer Science Laboratory. He is still the leading researcher there. After the merger of the Informatics Laboratory with the Laboratory artificial intelligence The well-known Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) was formed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

IN 1994 year he founded the World Wide Web Consortium at the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) at MIT. Since then and to this day, Tim Berners-Lee has headed this consortium. The consortium develops and implements standards for the Internet. The consortium aims to unleash the full potential of the World Wide Web, combining the stability of standards with their rapid evolution.

December 2004 Tim Berners-Lee became a professor at the University of Southampton. With strong support from the university, he hopes to implement the Semantic Web project.

In June 2009 British Prime Minister Gordon Brown appointed Berners-Lee as an adviser to the Cabinet of Ministers. In this position, he spent six months working on the dissemination of open government information.

in autumn 2009 Berners-Lee apologized for the fact that the web address standard he created uses two forward slashes ("//"). According to him, they were completely unnecessary, and adding them to addresses was purely a waste of time.

Based on the results of this work in December 2009 year it was announced that at the beginning 2010 year, the data.gov.uk portal will begin operating in the UK, on ​​which open access The data will range from weather reports compiled by the national weather service, the Met Office, to statistics on accidents, traffic flows and budget expenditures. According to Berners-Lee, this will stimulate the growth of the British economy by ensuring transparency in the work of government bodies. Information will be submitted to a single portal not only by the state, but also by local authorities.

Now Sir Tim lives in the suburbs of Boston with his wife and two children, and often travels around the world.

If I had known then how many people would enter the URL,
then I would not use two slashes in the syntax.

Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee(Timothy John "Tim" Berners-Lee) - famous British scientist, inventor of the World Wide Web (WWW, or World Wide Web), URI, URL, HTTP, HTML, etc. Born in London on June 8, 1955. His parents, Conway Berners-Lee Lee and Mary Lee Woods, both mathematicians, worked on the Manchester Mark I, one of the first computers.

At the age of 12, Tim was sent to London's private Emanuel School in Wandsworth. He then continued his studies at King's College, Oxford, where he graduated with honors in 1976 with a degree in Nuclear Physics. In this college, Tim had an incident that very well illustrates his character.

One fine day, he was caught playing games on the computer of a nuclear physics laboratory and was immediately deprived of access to it (in those days, computers were large, and computer time was expensive). But it was precisely this incident that prompted the lazy young man to design his own personal computer, which he assembled on the “base” of an old TV and a supported M6800 microprocessor. The keyboard was “made” from a broken calculator.

After graduating from Oxford University in 1976 Berners-Lee joined Plessey Telecommunications Ltd in Dorset, where he worked on distributed transaction systems. In 1978, he moved to D.G Nash Ltd, where he worked on programs for printers and created a kind of multitasking operating system.

Here he worked for about a year, and then moved to the European Laboratory for Nuclear Research (CERN), where he got a job as a software development consultant. It was then, for his own needs, that he wrote a small program “Enquire” (“Inquiry”, “Inquirer” or “ Notebook"). This program became the progenitor of the World Wide Web, but Tim didn’t even know about it at the time.

From 1981 to 1984, Tim Berners-Lee worked at Image Computer Systems Ltd as a systems architect. In 1984, he returned to CERN on a fellowship and began developing distributed systems for collecting scientific data. At this time, he worked on the FASTBUS system and developed his RPC system (English: Remote Procedure Call). The Enquire program has been redesigned.

At the new stage of development, it should not only support arbitrary hypertext links, facilitating search in the database, but also become a multi-user and platform-independent system. Despite the skepticism of senior colleagues, the World Wide Web project was approved and implemented. This happened in 1989. Tim received enormous assistance in this work from Robert Cailliau, sometimes called “ right hand» creator of the World Wide Web.

In the fall of 1990, CERN employees received the first “web server” and “web browser”, written by Mr. Berners-Lee in the NeXTStep environment. In the summer of 1991, the WWW project, which conquered the scientific world of Europe, crossed the ocean and joined the American one. The appearance of well-known abbreviations began: , URL, HTTP.

In 1994 Berners-Lee moves to the United States and becomes head of the 3Com Founders Chair at the MIT Computer Science Laboratory. He is still the leading researcher there. The merger of the Computer Science Laboratory with the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT created the well-known Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). At the same time, Tim Berners-Lee headed the international W3C consortium, acting as the World Wide Web Standards Chamber, which he himself founded at the Informatics Laboratory. The consortium develops and implements standards for the Internet. The W3C's goal is to unleash the full potential of the World Wide Web by combining the stability of standards with their rapid evolution. In December 2004, Tim Berners-Lee became a professor at the University of Southampton. With strong support from the university, he hopes to implement the Semantic Web project.

Sir Tim now lives in a Boston suburb with his wife Nancy Carlson and two children. He prefers not to share the details of his personal life with anyone.

Behind last years Tim Berners-Lee was awarded dozens of the most prestigious prizes, but never achieved fabulous wealth. Moreover, in a certain sense, it opposes the commercialization of the World Wide Web.

Berners-Lee's first-ever website at http://info.cern.ch/, the site is now archived. This site appeared on the Internet on August 6, 1991. This site described what the World Wide Web is, how to install a web server, how to get a browser, etc. This site was also the world's first Internet directory, because Tim Berners-Lee later posted and maintained a list of links to other sites there .

Tim Berners-Lee has written several books, most notably Weaving the Web: Origins and Future of the World Wide Web and Spinning the Semantic Web: Unlocking the Full Potential of the World Wide Web. (“Spinning the Semantic Web: Bringing the World Wide Web to Its Full Potential”).

Tim Berners-Lee(Sir English) Timothy John Berners-Lee* June 8, 1955, London) - British computer scientist and inventor of HTTP, HTML, URI and author of other developments in the field of information technology. Founder and Chairman of the W3C Consortium. On a note: How can I format a flash drive in Linux?
This NeXTcube-branded PC was the first web server. Tim Berners-Lee used it. Located in the CERN Museum, Canton of Geneva Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee OM, KBE (eng. Sir Timothy John "Tim" Berners-Lee; born June 8, 1955) - British scientist, inventor of URI, URL, HTTP, HTML, inventor of the World Wide Web (with Robert Cayo) and current head of the World Wide Web Consortium . Author of the concept of the semantic web. Author of many other developments in the field of information technology.
Biography
Tim Berners-Lee was born in London (England). His parents, Conway Berners-Lee and Mary Lee Woods, were both mathematicians and worked on the Manchester Mark I, one of the first computers. Tim attended Emanuel School in Wendsworthy and then King's College, Oxford. There he built his first computer based on the M6800 processor with a TV instead of a monitor. One day, Tim and his friend were caught carrying out a hacker attack, for which they were deprived of the right to use university computers.
After graduating from Oxford University in 1976, Berners-Lee joined Plessey Telecommunications Ltd in Dorset, where he worked for two years, mainly working on distributed transaction systems.
In 1978, Berners-Lee moved to DG Nash Ltd, where he worked on programs for printers and created a kind of multitasking operating system.
He then worked for a year and a half at the European Nuclear Research Laboratory CERN (Geneva, Switzerland) as a software consultant. It was there that he wrote the Enquire program for his own needs, which used random associations and laid the conceptual basis for the World Wide Web. From 1981 to 1984, Tim Berners-Lee worked at Image Computer Systems Ltd as a system architect.
In 1984, he received a scholarship to CERN and began developing distributed systems to collect scientific data. During this time he worked on the "FASTBUS" system and developed his RPC system (English: Remote Procedure Call, remote call procedures).
In 1989, while working at CERN on the internal document exchange system ENQUIRE, Berners-Lee proposed the global hypertext project, now known as the World Wide Web. The project was approved and implemented.
From 1991 to 1993, Tim Berners-Lee continued to work on the World Wide Web. He collected feedback from users and coordinated the work of the Web. Then he first proposed for wide discussion his first specifications of URI, HTTP and HTML.
In 1994, Berners-Lee became the 3Com Founders Chair at the MIT Computer Science Laboratory. He is still the leading researcher there. The merger of the Computer Science Laboratory with the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT created the well-known Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).
In 1994, he founded the World Wide Web Consortium at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS). Since then and to this day, Tim Berners-Lee has headed this consortium. The consortium develops and implements standards for the Internet. The consortium aims to unleash the full potential of the World Wide Web, combining the stability of standards with their rapid evolution.
In December 2004, Tim Berners-Lee became a professor at the University of Southampton. With strong support from the university, he hopes to implement the Semantic Web project.
Sir Tim now lives in a Boston suburb with his wife and two children and often travels around the world.
Inventions
In 1989, while working at CERN, Berners-Lee proposed a project known as the World Wide Web. The project implied the publication hypertext documents, interconnected by hyperlinks, which would facilitate the search and consolidation of information. The Web Project was intended for CERN scientists and was initially used on the CERN intranet. To implement the project, Tim Berners-Lee (together with his assistants) invented URIs (and, as special case, URL), HTTP protocol And HTML language. These technologies formed the basis of the modern World Wide Web. Between 1991 and 1993 Berners-Lee improved technical specifications standards and published them.
As part of the project, Berners-Lee wrote the world's first web server, "httpd", and the world's first hypertext web browser, called "WorldWideWeb". This browser was also a WYSIWYG editor (English WYSIWYG from W hat Y ou S ee I s W hat Y ou G et, “what you see is what you get”), its development began in October 1990 and was completed in December of the same year. The program worked in the NeXTStep environment and began to spread across the Internet in the summer of 1991.
Berners-Lee created the world's first website at http://info.cern.ch and the site is now archived. This site appeared online on the Internet on August 6, 1991. This site described what the World Wide Web is, how to install a web server, how to get a browser, etc. This site was also the world's first Internet directory, because later Tim Berners-Lee posted and maintained a list of links to other sites there.
Berners-Lee's main literary work is Weaving the Web: The Origins and Future of the World Wide Web. "Weaving the Web: Origins and Future of the World Wide Web", Texere Publishing, 1999, ISBN 0-7528-2090-7). In this book, he talks about the process of creating the Web, its concept and his vision of the development of the Internet. In this seminal work, the author talks about several important principles:

The ability to edit information on the Web is no less important than the ability to simply surf it. In this sense, Berners-Lee is relying heavily on the WYSIWYG concept, although Wiki is also a step in the right direction.
Computers can be used for background processes”, helping people work together.
Every aspect of the Internet should work like a web, not a hierarchy. In this sense, a very unpleasant exception is the domain name system. Domain Name System, DNS), managed by ICANN.
Computer scientists have not only a technical responsibility, but also a moral one.

Another book by Berners-Lee is called Spinning the Semantic Web: Unleashing the Full Potential of the World Wide Web. "Spinning the Semantic Web: Bringing the World Wide Web to Its Full Potential", The MIT Press, 2005, ISBN 0-262-56212 -X). In this book, he reveals the concept of the semantic web, in which he sees the future of the Internet.
The Semantic Web is an add-on to the existing World Wide Web, which is designed to make information posted on the network more understandable to computers. Moreover, each resource in human language would be provided with a description understandable to the computer. The Semantic Web opens up access to clearly structured information for any application, regardless of platform and regardless of programming languages. Programs will be able to find the necessary resources themselves, classify data, identify logical connections, draw conclusions and even make decisions based on these conclusions. If widely adopted and implemented wisely, the Semantic Web has the potential to spark a revolution on the Internet.
Rank
On July 16, 2004, Tim Berners-Lee was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II (KBE, FRS, FRAEng) for “service to the global development of the Internet.”
Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee is Emeritus Professor at the following universities:

Parsons School of Design, New York (DFA, 1996)
University of Essex (DU, 1998)
Southern Cross University (1998)
Open University (DU, 2000)
Columbia University (D. Law, 2001)
Oxford University (2001)
University of Port Elizabeth (D.Sc.)

Tim Berners-Lee is also a Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society, an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Electrical Engineering, and an Honorary Fellow of the Society technical communications, member of the Guillermo Marconi Foundation, member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, fellow of the Royal Society (2001), member of the American Philosophical Society, foreign member of the US National Academy of Sciences (2009).
Awards
Tim Berners-Lee has received many awards of various kinds, including international ones. Some of them are listed below.

Order of Merit
IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computer and Communications Award;
Award from PC Magazine for “Long-term contribution to technical excellence”;
Inclusion by Time magazine in the list of “100 Greatest Minds of the Century” (1999);
Pioneer Award from the Electronic Freedom Foundation;
Japan Prize from the Science and Technology Foundation of Japan (2002);
Scientific and Technical Research Award from the Prince of Asturias Foundation (shared with Larry Roberts, Rob Kahn and Vint Cerf);
First prize “Technology of the Millennium” (2004);
Special Award from the American Society for Information Science and Technology;
British Commonwealth Award for Outstanding Contribution to Mass Communication (2005).