Tim Berners-Lee
By Katie Hourigan
The Birth of the World Wide Web
Tim Berners Lee is known as the creator of the World Wide Web. He was born and grew up in London and studied physics at Oxford University before going on to become one fo the most important figures in the history of computing.
The first idea of the world wide web took place in 1980 when he first thought up the idea of a system that would allow information to be shared across the globe.
In 1984 Berners-Lee moved to work as a software engineer at CERN, a large physics laboratory in Switzerland. Here, scientists would travel to Switzerland to do their research and then have go back to their laboratories around the world , to share their ideas with local scientists. It was difficult for results, ideas and data to be shared with other scientists from around the world on a wide scale. Berners-Lee knew the potential of computers all over the globe connecting with each other.
Berners-Lee proposed his idea of the internet becoming accessible to everyone and by 1990 had come up with the three fundamental parts of the World Wide Web today: HTML, URI, and HTTP. These are the codes that request pages from web servers.
He created the first web browser and the first web server which meant by the end of 1990 the first web page was served.
By 1991, the new web community had people outside of CERN joining it and the ideas was expanding more and more.
Eventually in 1993 CERN allowed everyone to use the World Wide Web.
Today, the World Wide Web is the one of the biggest methods of communication and is used everywhere in the world.
Tim Berners-Lee now teaches at Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a 3Com Founders Professor of Engineering.