When Tim Berners Lee died. Do you know who invented the Internet? early life and education

Apartment selection 16.02.2022
Apartment selection

Creator of the World Wide Web

British scientist who created the 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, since 2009 he has been an adviser to the UK government. In his opinion, in the future the Internet should evolve into the "Semantic Web".

Timothy "Tim" John Berners-Lee (Timothy "Tim" John Berners-Lee) was born in London on June 8, 1955,. His parents, father Conway Berners-Lee (Conway Berners-Lee) and mother Mary Lee Woods (Mary Lee Woods) were mathematicians-programmers: at the University of Manchester (Manchester University) they worked together to create the Manchester Mark I - the first commercial electronic computer with RAM , , , , . As a child, Berners-Lee enjoyed drawing on computer punched cards and assembling toy computers from cardboard boxes.

Berners-Lee studied at the prestigious Emanuel School from 1969 to 1973. 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, he decided to study physics, , , , , . At Oxford, computers became a new passion for Berners-Lee: 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 the university computer, he was forbidden to use it,,,.

After graduating from the University of Oxford in 1976 with a bachelor's degree in physics with honors, Berners-Lee moved to Dorset and took a job at the Plessey Corporation, where he programmed distributed transaction systems, information communication systems, and also worked on technology in the Plessey Controls division. barcodes, . In 1978, he moved to D.G Nash Ltd, where he created software for printers and multitasking systems. In 1980, Berners-Lee worked as a software consultant in Switzerland for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). There, in his spare time, he wrote the Enquire program, which used hypertext to access documents: later, its concept formed the basis of the World Wide Web,,.

From 1981 to 1984, Berners-Lee worked for Image Computer Systems Ltd, working on the architecture of real-time systems and graphics and communications software. In 1984, Berners-Lee took up scientific work 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-Lee first proposed the idea of ​​the World Wide Web ("World Wide Web", the term was coined by himself) to the leadership of his CERN division. It was based on the Enquire program: the idea was to exchange scientific information on hypertext web pages using the TCP / IP data transfer protocol. This protocol was used on the US military network ARPANET, the predecessor of the Internet, and on the university network NSFNET until 1988, and by 1989 it began to be used for commercial purposes, in particular for exchanging mail, reading newsgroups and real-time communication. The idea proposed by Berners-Lee was liked by his leader, Mike Sandall, but he did not allocate any large funds and suggested that for the time being, experiment on one NeXT personal computer. On it, Berners-Lee wrote the first ever CERN HTTPd web server and the first web browser and page editor, WorldWideWeb. He also developed the HTTP application layer protocol, the HTML language, and a standardized way to write a website address on the Internet - URL , , , , , , , , , , . In 1990, the Belgian Robert Cailliau joined the Berners-Lee project. He secured funding for the project and took up organizational problems,.

Work on the basic standards of the invention was completed in May 1991, and on August 6, 1991, Berners-Lee, in the alt.hypertext newsgroup, first announced the creation of the World Wide Web and gave a link to the first site on the Internet that talked about the technology, and subsequently was conducted directory of other sites , , . In 1993, thanks to the efforts of Kayo and the agreement of CERN, Berners-Lee released the entire concept of the World Wide Web into the public domain, reserving 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 the Gopher protocol, developed a few years earlier by the University of Minnesota (University of Minnesota), could become a possible alternative to the World Wide Web, but, according to Berners-Lee, Gopher could not compete with WWW due to the fact that, unlike from CERN, the creators of the protocol demanded money for its implementation.

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

In 2004, Berners-Lee became Professor and Chair of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Southampton, , . Together with MIT and the University of Southampton, he founded and co-led the Web Science Research Initiative, an organization dedicated to attracting scientific staff to explore the potential for the development 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.

In June 2009, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown appointed Berners-Lee as Cabinet Adviser. In this position, for six months he dealt with the dissemination of open government information,. As a result of this work, in December 2009 it was announced that in early 2010 the data.gov.uk portal will be launched in the UK, where a variety of data will be available in the public domain: from weather reports compiled by the Met Office, the national meteorological service, to statistics on accidents, traffic flows and budget expenditures. According to Berners-Lee, this will stimulate the growth of the British economy by ensuring the transparency of the work of government bodies. Information in a single portal will be submitted not only by the state, but also by local governments,,.

Berners-Lee himself has repeatedly stated that the Internet is still at the very beginning of its development,. He did not stop at creating the basic protocols of the World Wide Web. He called the future of the Internet the "Semantic Web", which will facilitate machine data processing on the network by streamlining the information posted on the Internet: assigning universal resource identifiers (URIs) to all objects and the widespread use of metadata, tags and ontologies (simplistically, metadata dictionaries ), which will greatly simplify the search and work with information , , , , , . In 2001, Berners-Lee stated that in a few years the World Wide Web would evolve into the Semantic Web, however, the evolution process dragged on, and the concept of the Semantic Web itself was met with criticism: it was noted that the very idea of ​​the Semantic Web was flawed and unrealizable due to the human factor, experts expressed the opinion that working on it draws resources away from more important W3C projects, , . Among the implemented proposals of Berners-Lee, one can note the appearance of websites that became possible not only to read, but also to edit online: Wikipedia and blogs, . Berners-Lee, in an interview with The Telegraph, said that he did not regret that his invention became popular among pornography distributors and scammers. However, according to him, he would like to change the structure of the World Wide Web so that it does not allow spamming,. It is noteworthy that in late 2008, Berners-Lee lost money when he bought a Christmas present in an online store, becoming the victim of Internet scams.

In the fall of 2009, Berners-Lee apologized for the fact that the web address standard he created uses two slashes ("slashes" - "//"). According to him, they were completely redundant, and adding them to addresses caused nothing but a waste of time.

Berners-Lee is the author of the book "Weaving the Web", in which he talks about the history of the creation and future of the worldwide web,. In 1999, Time magazine named Berners-Lee one of the 100 most important people and 20 most important thinkers of the 20th century. Berners-Lee is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Royal Society of London. In 2004, Berners-Lee became the first recipient of the Finnish Millennium Technology Prize, receiving about 1 million euros as an award.

Berners-Lee has been married twice. His first wife was named Jane (Jane), they met while studying at Oxford University, got married immediately after graduation and initially worked together at Plessey. With his second wife, programmer Nancy Carlson (Nancy Carlson), Berners-Lee met while working at CERN, they got married in 1990 and together they raise two children: daughter Alice (Alice) and son Ben (Ben) , , . As a child, Berners-Lee was baptized in the Church of England, but quickly abandoned that religion. Already after the invention of the World Wide Web, he became a parishioner of the Unitarian-Universalist Church,,,. Berners-Lee loves to walk in nature, plays the piano and guitar.

14.03.2018

Timothy John Berners-Lee
Timothy John Berners-Lee

British Scientist

Timothy John Berners-Lee was born on June 8, 1955 in London, UK. He studied at the Emanuel School in Wandsworth, then at the Oxford King's College. There, Timothy built the first computer based on the M6800 processor with a TV instead of a monitor.

After graduating from Oxford University in 1976 with a B.A. in physics with honors, Berners-Lee joined Plessey Telecommunications Ltd in Dorset, where he worked for two years, focusing on distributed transaction systems. In 1978, Berners-Lee moved to D.G Nash Ltd, where he developed printer software and created a sort of multitasking operating system.

Then, the young scientist worked for a year and a half at the CERN European Laboratory for Nuclear Research, located in Geneva, Switzerland. Worked as a software consultant. It was there that Tim wrote the Enquire program for his own use, which used random associations and laid the conceptual foundation for the World Wide Web. Between 1981 and 1984, Tim Berners-Lee worked for Image Computer Systems Ltd as a systems architect.

In 1984, he received a fellowship from CERN and began developing distributed systems for collecting scientific data. During this time, the specialist worked on the FASTBUS system and developed a personal Remote Procedure Call system. 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.

Further, from 1991 to 1993, the scientist continued to work on the World Wide Web. Collected feedback from users and coordinated the work of the Web. Then, Timothy first proposed for wide discussion the first personal specifications of URI, HTTP and HTML. In 1994, Berners-Lee took over as chair of the 3Com Founders Chair at the MIT Computer Science Laboratory. He was the leading researcher of the department at that time.

After the merger of the Computer Science Laboratory with the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory was formed. In the same year, 1994, the scientist founded the World Wide Web Consortium at the Laboratory for Computer Science, LCS MIT, in which he is the permanent leader. The consortium develops and implements standards for the Internet.

In December 2004, Timothy Berners-Lee was awarded the title of Professor at the University of Southampton. With strong support from the university, the scientist hopes to implement the Semantic Web project.

Lives in the suburbs of Boston, Massachusetts, USA. Married. Has two children.

Great Britain has given the world many influential scientists. Such people usually give rise to grandiose ideas, theories and inventions that can change the world forever. This ranking contains ten such inventions of the British.

10. United States of America.

A slightly controversial invention opens the list. The United States of America was formed when the British colonies in North America declared independence after an eight-year war with the colonialists.

The fact remains that the inhabitants of the colonies were British subjects until the victory in 1783 when they became independent Americans. By this logic, the USA at the time of its creation was a British invention 🙂

9. Almost every modern sport


The most popular sports in the world today have their origins in the UK, at least in terms of standardized rules. First of all, it is about football, cricket, rugby and tennis. Of course, the British were not the first to come up with the idea of ​​\u200b\u200bdriving the ball around the field, but it was they who built the system of rules for most sports as we know it now.

8. Newton's laws


British Isaac Newton- one of the greatest physicists and mathematicians in the history of mankind. It was he who discovered the law of universal gravitation and established the three basic laws of motion.

7. Programmable computer


English mathematician and engineer Charles Babbage(1791–1871) is one of the most significant figures in the prehistory of computer computing. He is rightly called the father of computing. The Analytical Engine, invented by him in 1834, had all the essential logical capabilities of today's mainframe PCs.

6. World Wide Web


The World Wide Web is a distributed system that provides access to interconnected documents located on various computers connected to the Internet. invented the World Wide Web in 1989 British scientist Tim Berners-Lee. He is also the author of HTTP, URI/URL and HTML technologies.

5. Television


In 1926, Scottish inventor John Logie Bird demonstrated a mechanical television. The picture had 30 vertical lines. The image changed due to the revolutions of a special disk. The speed is 5 frames per second instead of the 24 common today.

Today, Byrd's TV may seem ironic to some. But then it was a real breakthrough. Scientists have been trying to create something similar since the advent of radio. However, no one succeeded, but Byrd did.

IN 1926 Scottish inventor John Logie Baird demonstrated a mechanical TV. The picture had 30 vertical lines. The image changed due to the revolutions of a special disk. The speed is 5 frames per second instead of the 24 common today.

Today, Baird's television may be ironic to some. But then it was a real breakthrough. Scientists have been trying to create something similar since the advent of radio. However, before Baird, no one could do it.

4. Steam locomotive


March 24, 1802 English inventor Richard Trevithick received the first patent for a steam locomotive.

Richard Trevithick proved by experience that the frictional force of the smooth wheels of a steam locomotive on smooth rails is perfectly sufficient to move the locomotive even if it has to drag a train of loaded wagons. Thus, he revolutionized the transportation industry.

3. Theory of evolution



The evolutionary theory of a British scientist Charles Darwin was truly revolutionary. The main work of the researcher is a book "Origin of Species", in which natural selection and variability are named as the driving forces of evolution. The works of the scientist became the foundation of modern biology.

2. Phone

Alexander Graham Bell born March 3, 1847 in Edinburgh. Alexander received a degree in physiology from University College London. In 1871, Bell's family emigrated to the United States, where he founded a school for deaf children. In order to somehow help them, the scientist undertook to investigate the nature of vibrations. The results of Bell's research formed the basis of the future telephone. IN 1876 the first telephone session took place.

British scientists. This phrase, probably, is already impossible to pronounce or hear all over the world without laughter. So "good" guys from the UK have proven themselves today. Undoubtedly, they also make really important discoveries. But basically, these are such strange and absurd things that we have a completely logical question: where do the funds that should be spent on scientific research really go? In our time, after all, there is something to discover and invent. We have an unconquered space above our heads, all sorts of sores, environmental problems, and a bunch of other things to boot. And gentlemen eggheads (as they are also called) make "amazing" discoveries in various fields of science. So, they found out that 9 out of 10 ladybugs die from sexual diseases; came to the conclusion that sex is much better than masturbation. And the icing on the cake of absurdity: they found that the problem of overweight people lies in the fact that they eat too much. Amazing. We urgently need to give them the Nobel Prize. But we will tell you about real British scientists whose discoveries turned the world upside down.

1. Michael Faraday

This man is a great experimenter of his generation. It is thanks to him that the city in which you are located is equipped with electricity. Because of him, you now use a mobile phone, laptop and other things you need. After all, it was Faraday who was the discoverer of electromagnetic induction, and at the same time the inventor of the electric motor. Faraday's developments went into the industrial production of electricity, which helps you enjoy all the benefits of this life. It is worth noting that with his scholarship, Mr. Faraday proved that if you really want to do something, understand something, then for this you just need your head, perseverance, patience and diligence. After all, he never received a secondary education, becoming self-taught. Like any other great man, his area of ​​​​knowledge lay much further than physics. Among other sciences, Faraday was actively interested in theater and literature, which brought him closer to Charles Dickens, who corresponded with this British scientist with great pleasure from time to time.

2. Ernest Rutherford

This man, also a physicist, although he was well-read, erudite and intelligent, did not recognize other sciences. As he himself said, science is divided into two parts, one of which is physics, and the other is stamp collecting. Rutherford was the founding father of nuclear physics. Perhaps we should not thank him, because thanks to his discoveries, we have the presence in the world of not the most pleasant weapon of mass destruction - a nuclear bomb. But man is a curious creature. If not him, then someone else would have thought of it. And after all these great discoveries, huge volumes of scientific research, Rutherford was nevertheless awarded the Nobel Prize. True, chemistry. This fact did not upset, but obviously very surprised the scientist, who put physics above all sciences, although he was a pretty good chemist. As well as a teacher, after all, 12 students of Rutherford subsequently received the Nobel Prize in chemistry and physics.

3. Charles Darwin

How much the father of the great scientist was mistaken, prophesying not the best fate for his son. Dad did not share childhood hobbies of little Charles. But already from childhood, Darwin was slowly moving towards a scientific career and future discoveries. He liked to closely monitor the animals, catch rats, studying them for a long time. Traveling widely, observing nature and this world, Darwin produced his offspring, a work called "The Origin of Species", which put the society of that time on the ears. Someone said that it was brilliant, someone (mostly churchmen) called Darwin a heretic and a freethinker. But the book had already been written, and the way back was cut off. It was Darwin who introduced such phrases as "natural selection", "evolution" and much more. With all this, the scientist remained a deeply religious person until the end of his life, not denying the existence of God. He just said that people did not come from him, but from monkeys. He was also remembered not only for this, but also for his passion for writing letters. The number of its addressees reaches two thousand, and in total the scientist wrote about fifteen thousand letters in his life. I wonder who all these people who communicated with this great man?

4. Alexander Fleming

Meet the dad of antibiotics. He worked all his life to make you less sick, and you endured your ailments much easier. And this person is also an example of how competently you need to be able to manage the happy accidents that happen to us. After all, his discoveries are pure luck. The first great experience that made a revolution in medicine, Fleming made in 1920. Then he was often sick, and maybe that's why he came up with a rather strange idea to anoint some parts of the Petri dish, where the bacteria were, with his snot. After a few days, he found that the bacteria had been destroyed. So Fleming was able to conclude that in the human body there is a certain enzyme that is capable of. And years later, Alexander discovered penicillin, arranging a revolution in medical science. Everything also happened by chance. His lab was often a mess. And one day, the scientist accidentally discovered that in a Petri dish, which, apparently, was his talisman of good luck, a colony of mold mushrooms had grown. They destroyed the bacteria that were placed in the cup. A year later, Fleming published his revolutionary work, earning not only the title of a great scientist, but also in 1999 - the title of one of the hundred important people of the 20th century.

5. Godfrey Hounsfield

A little more on the topic of medicine. It is customary to say about this man that he changed her alone. They probably forget about Fleming. But we will not argue: the contribution of this scientist to science is enormous, and most importantly, useful to you and me. If not for this person, it would be quite problematic to study and treat some of our diseases. In the first place, we might not have known about them if not for Sir Godfrey. By the way, we didn't call him Sir for nothing. This title was given to him by the Queen of England herself. You see how much he means to the country, because not everyone Elizabeth II handed out such titles. So what did this person do? We answer: Sir Godfrey invented the method of computed tomography, or, as they say among our people, CT. By the way, it is impossible not to mention that there could have been no discovery at all if it were not for the Beatles. Yes, the Liverpool Four unknowingly helped a group of scientists. After all, the company where Hounsfield worked was engaged not only in scientific research, but also in sound recording. And the contract with the Beatles helped to further finance them. So it's definitely not worth denying the power of music.

6. Stephen Hawking

Well, this master of science, who unfortunately passed away not so long ago, needs no introduction. But we could not but put him on a par with those of whom we have already spoken, because his research has also become quite revolutionary. All these thoughts about space, black holes, quantum mechanics just turned the familiar world of people upside down. But perhaps Hawking's main merit lies in a few other things. Firstly, he was able to instill in millions of people a love for science by releasing a number of his books based on his own research, but written in a simple, accessible, not abstruse language. Secondly, he became a role model, showing remarkable courage, showing how to love life, how your favorite business and the desire to live will constantly push you forward, how to remain an ordinary person, despite the fact that your illness has broken you. For this and for his work, we thank him with all our hearts. Thanks Steven!

Return to CERN happened in 1984 - Berners-Lee was invited to work on the "FASTBUS" system. In parallel with this, he developed RPC - his own remote procedure call system, which, roughly speaking, allowed you to access functions or procedures on another computer, and also finalized Enquire - it was she who eventually turned into the World Wide Web.

In general, Berners-Lee is not that he was going to change the world. He simply worked for the benefit of his employer, simultaneously implementing some of his own projects, which, again, were created in order to simplify and automate the work. This is how the WWW came about. And this is worth talking about in more detail.

Creation of the World Wide Web

The terms "World Wide Web" (World Wide Web, www) and "Internet" are often confused, although they are far from the same thing. The Internet - just like a network - was indeed created by the US military and long before the WWW. But the World Wide Web is a project that originated in Europe, within the walls of the CERN nuclear research laboratory in Geneva, and Berners-Lee was its author. Although, of course, it was the creation of the WWW that provoked the frantic pace of the development of the Internet.

So what is the World Wide Web? This phrase Berners-Lee called the scheme of cross-references in hypertext documents. To put it even more simply, these are web pages with links. That is, each web page is such a document created using a special HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language - Hypertext Markup Language) document. And this document has its own unique link URI / URL (Uniform Resource Identifier - Uniform Resource Identifier), and you can access it using a special program - a browser - via the HTTP protocol (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol - Hypertext Document Transfer Protocol).

We recommend reading

Top