Tim Berners-Lee
The World Wide Web
Introduction to Sir Tim Berners Lee
Many people of the millennium generation know nothing about the internet before it became what it has today, one of the most used things in the world, but nobody thinks twice about how it came to be. The Man to thank for this creation is Sir Tim Berners Lee.
Berners-Lee was born in southwest London, England, on 8 June 1955. He attended Sheen Mount Primary School, and then went on to attend south west London's independent Emanuel School from 1969 to 1973.A keen Train Spotter as a child, he learnt about electronics from tinkering with a model railway. He studied at Queens College, Oxford from 1973 to 1976, where he received a First-class Degree in physics.
Why the World Wide Web?
Before there was the public internet there was the internet's forerunner ARPAnet or Advanced Research Projects Agency Networks. ARPAnet was funded by the United States military after the cold war with the aim of having a military command and control center that could withstand nuclear attack. The point was to distribute information between computers across the globe. The ARPAnet opened in 1969 and was quickly usurped by civilian computer nerds who had now found a way to share the few great computers that existed at that time.
Tim Berners Lee was the man leading the development of the World Wide Web (with help of course), the defining of HTML (hypertext markup language) used to create web pages, HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) and URLs (Universal Resource Locators). All of those developments took place between 1989 and 1991.