Tim Berners-Lee and Alan Turing
Two Great Legends
Who is Tim Berners-Lee?
Timothy John Berners-Lee was was born on 8 June 1955 and grew up in London. He studied physics at Oxford University and became a software engineer. In 1980, while working at CERN in Geneva, he described the concept of a global system, based on the concept of 'hypertext', that would allow researchers anywhere to share information.
He also built a prototype called 'Enquire'.
In 1989, Berners Lee published a paper called 'Information Management: A Proposal' (shown below) in which he married up hypertext with the Internet, to create a system for sharing and distributing information globally.
He named it the World Wide Web.
A copy of the Worlds first website can be seen at http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html or below (second picture)
Who is Alan Turing
In 1936, Turing went to Princeton University in America, returning to England in 1938. He began to work secretly part-time for the British cryptanalytic department, the Government Code and Cypher School. On the outbreak of war he took up full-time work at its headquarters, Bletchley Park.
He played a vital role in deciphering the messages encrypted by the German Enigma machine, which provided intel for the Allies. He took the lead in a team that designed a machine known as a bombe that successfully decoded German messages. After the war, he worked at the National Physical labutory, where he designed the ACE, one of the first designs for a stored-program computer. In 1948 Turing joined Max Newman's Computing Laboratory at Manchester University, where he assisted in the development of the Manchester computers and became interested in mathematical biology.
In 1952, Turing was arrested and tried for homosexuality, he avoided prison by accepting injections of oestrogen for a year.
Sadly he committed suicide on 7 June, 1954.