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Sir Tim Berners-Lee
Biography
Open University Course: T171 TMA
Sir Tim Berners-Lee has been quoted as being the Nobel Prize winner of the
computer
(Schmidt of Time)
This article contains quotes from Berners-Lee. Where he was educated and worked. Also
contains links to the numerous awards that have been accredited him.
Emanuel School London: 1969-1973
Thoughts from Berners-Lee: Emanuel School was programmed to send people to Oxford, The
Maths teacher at Emanuel, Frank Grundy, who conveyed the excitement of the subject with a
twinkle of his eye, could make numerical approximations in his head, faster than we could
work it out longhand, and would throw in a teaser question in his conversation. To puzzle
anyone; thinking that they might have figured the subject out.
Queen's College Oxford: 1973-1976
BA Hons: (I) Physics.
Unlike most people at Oxford, I had one tutor for almost all the work. John Moffat has a
vary rare talent for being able to understand not only the physics itself, but also my
tangled misguided attempts at it, and then showing me in my terms; using my strange
symbols, and vocabulary, where I had gone wrong. Many people can only explain the world
from their own point of view.
In 1976, Tim Berners-Lee: graduated from Queen's College, at Oxford University in
England. While there he built his first computer with a soldering iron, TTL gates, a
M6800 processor and an old television. He spent two years with
Plessey Telecommunications
Ltd, a major UK Telecom equipment manufacturer, working on distributed transaction
systems, message relays, and bar code technology.
In 1978 he left Plessey to join D.G Nash Ltd (Ferndown, Dorset, UK), where he wrote among
other things, typesetting software for intelligent printers. In addition, a year and a
half was spent as an independent consultant. Including a six-month stint from Jun to Dec
1980 as consultant software engineer at
CERN. The European Particle, Physics Laboratory:
Geneva Switzerland.
While there, he wrote for his own private use, his first program, that stored information
which included using random associations - named
ENQUIRE it was a Notebook program,
'Enquire-Within-Upon-Everything', which allows links to be made. Each node had a title, a
type, and a list of Bi-directional typed links. 'ENQUIRE' run on Norsk Data machines,
under SINTRAN-III. It was never published; this program formed the conceptual basis for
the future development of the World Wide Web.
From 1981 until 1984, Tim worked at John Poole's
Image Computer Systems Ltd, having technical design
responsibility. Work there included real time control firmware graphics, and in 1984, he
took up a Fellowship at CERN, to work on distributed real-time systems, for scientific
data acquisition, and system control. Among other things, he worked on
FASTBUS system software, and
designed a heterogeneous, remote procedure call system.
In 1989, he proposed a global hypertext project, to be known as the
World Wide
Web. Based on the earlier 'Enquire' work, it was designed to allow people to
work together, by combining their knowledge in a web of hypertext documents. He wrote the
first 'World Wide Web' server, 'httpd'. And the first client; World Wide Web: a
What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get
(WYSIWYG). this work was
started in October 1990, and the program World Wide Web, was first made available within
CERN, in December, and on the Internet at large; by the summer of 1991
Through 1991 and 1993, Berners-Lee continued working on the design of the Web, His
initial specifications of URI's, HTTP and HTML: where refined and discussed in larger
circles as the Web Technology spread.
In 1994, Tim joined the Laboratory for Computer Science,
LCS at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology:
MIT. In 1999, he became the first holder of
the
3Com Founders
chair. He is Director of the World Wide Web Consortium, that co-ordinates Web
development worldwide, with teams at MIT, at
INRIA in
France, and at Keio University: Japan. The Consortium takes as its goal, to lead the Web
to its full potential, ensuring its stability, through rapid evolution, and revolutionary
transformations of its usage. The Consortium is found at
WC3
Consortium.
Information from the
Living Internet:
Timothy Berners-Lee, the British mastermind of the World Wide Web, is among 43 new
fellows elected to the distinguished UK scientific body.
The Royal C Medal for 2000, was awarded to Mr Timothy Berners-Lee OBE, in recognition of
his invention, and subsequent development of the World Wide Web, designing the: Universal
Resource Locator (URL), an addressing system to give each Web page, a unique location,
and the two protocols HTTP and HTML. His work has revolutionized communication via the
Internet, enabling universal access to information placed on the Web.
Truly a Genius