Tim Berners-Lee

Who is he?

Tim Berners-Lee was born in London, on the 8th of June 1955. He studied at the Oxford University between 1973 and 1976. He took advantage of his studient life to build his first computer using a M6800 and an old TV set.

Between 1976 and 1980 he worked for English companies. In 1980, as he was an external consultant for the CERN in Geneva, he wrote a program called "Enquire" to store data using random associations. He decided not to follow up this project, but actually it will be the basis for the World Wide Web.

Between 1981 and 1984 Tim worked in a company on real time distributed systems. In 1984 he returned for a short period to the CERN.

In 1989, using its old "Enquire" system, Tim proposed a projet based on hypertext mechanism; he decided to call it "World Wide Web" (he also thought about "Information Mesh", "Mine of Information", or "Information Mine"). The goal of this project is to gather the knowledge of everybody in a "web" of hypertext documents. He then developed in october 1990 the first HTTP server and web client (already WYSIWYG) in the world. His invention is widely distributed on the Internet during summer 1991.

For 3 years, between 1991 and 1993, he kept on developing the web and brought the famous notions of URI, HTTP and HTML.

Since then Tim moved to the United States where he manages the 3Com (Computer Communication Compatibility) at the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He also leading the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) whose goal is to make the Web give its best.

References

His personal web page at the W3C: http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/

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