TIM BERNERS-LEE
AND HOW HE BECAME FAMOUS
10 FABULOUS FACTS...
1)He received a knighthood in 2004 from Queen Elizabeth II.
2)He is the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) a group set up to oversee the development of the World Wide Web.
3)He was born on 8th June 1955 in London.
4)He has admitted that the pair of slashes (//) in web addresses ended up being unnecessary. He said he could have designed URLs without them, but didn’t realise at the time.
5)Time Berners-Lee made the first communication between an HTTP (Hypertest Transfer Protocol) client and server through the internet in November 1989. He invented the World Wide Web.
6)He was honoured during the opening ceremony of the 2012 Summer Olympics in London.
7)He was one of Time Magazine’s ‘100 Most Important People of the 20th Century’.
8)He is sometimes referred to as TimBL.
9)In 2001, Tim Berners-Lee became a Fellow of the Royal Society.
10)He was a very keen trainspotter when he was a child and he enjoyed playing with model railways.
HIS LIFE ...
In 1980, while working at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, he first 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 1984, Berners Lee's returned to CERN, which was also home to a major European Internet node. In 1989, Berners Lee published a paper called 'Information Management: A Proposal' in which he married up hypertext with the Internet, to create a system for sharing and distributing information not just within a company, but globally. He named it the World Wide Web.
He also created the first web browser and editor. The world's first website, http://info.cern.ch, was launched on 6 August 1991. It explained the World Wide Web concept and gave users an introduction to getting started with their own websites.