Tim Berners-Lee

If e-commerce has become a buzzword where billions of dollars are at stake, it is due to the phenomenon called Internet. And the man who made Internet possible was Tim Berners-Lee, a British physicist, now affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Time magazine cited him as one of the 100 greatest minds of the 20th century. Unlike so many of the inventions that have changed the world, this was work of one man.

After graduating from Oxford University in 1976, Berners-Lee spent two years with Plessey Telecommunications Ltd, working on distributed transaction systems, message relays, and bar code technology. In 1978, he joined DG Nash Ltd, where he wrote software for intelligent printers, a multi-tasking
operating system, and a generic macro expander. Then, he spent a year and a half as an independent consultant including a six-month stint at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. While with this organization he wrote for private use his first program for storing information using random associations. Named “Enquire”, this program formed the basis for the future development of the World Wide Web (WWW). He handled technical design from 1981 to 1984 in the company, Image Computer Systems Ltd.

In 1984, he started work on distributed real-time systems at CERN for
scientific data acquisition and system control. In 1989, he proposed a global hypertext project, to be known as the WWW. It was based on the earlier
“Enquire” work aimed to allow people to work together by combining their knowledge in a web of hypertext documents. He wrote the first WWW server and the first client in October 1990, and the program “World Wide Web” was first made available within CERN in December that year, and on the Internet in the summer of 1991. From 1991 to 1993, Berners-Lee continued working on the design of the Web, co-ordinating feedback from users across the Internet. His initial specifications of URLs, HTTP, and HTML were refined.

In 1994, he joined the Laboratory for Computer Science at the MIT as director of the W3 Consortium, which coordinates W3 development world-wide, with teams at MIT and at INRIA in France. The consortium aims to
realize the full potential of the Web, ensuring its stability through rapid evolution and revolutionary transformations of its usage.

In 1995, Berners-Lee received the Kilby Foundation’s “Young Innovator of the Year” award for his invention of the Web. He shared the ACM Software Systems Award in 1995. He is also the winner of MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant to continue his work with the W3 Consortium in setting technological standards for the future.

His book, “Weaving the Web”, written with Mark Fischetti, provides for the first time an insight into the step-by-step evolution of one of technology’s greatest accomplishments. In the book he confesses, “People are constantly disappointed that there was no `Eureka!’ moment where the Web just came to me, but it really was an evolutionary process.” Berners-Lee is worried about a growing consolidation of ISPs under one company or conglomerate. Continued mergers such as MCI-Sprint deal could give big providers the capability to limit
users to only one home page, thereby, censoring the Web’s ever expanding content.