Tim Berners-Lee

Introduction

Thirty years ago, if we wanted to communicate it was via post, landline phone calls or face-to-face conversations. Thanks to Tim Berners-Lee’s innovations in the late 1980’s communication has never been simpler. He had allowed social media platforms to expand, online ecommerce to boom and social activities easier than ever to organise - all thanks to one of his inventions: the World Wide Web.

Early Life

(Study.com, 2012)

It all started back on 8th June 1955 when Tim Berners-Lee was born. Raised by Lee-Woods and Conway Berners-Lee (KidsKonnect, 2018) who were both computer scientists - so from an early age he had his mind set on which pathway he was going to follow. His early knowledge of electronics came from playing around with his model railways and focusing on the interactivity of them. (famousscientists.org, 2021).

(www.bbc.co.uk, n.d.)

He spent most of his early life in and around London, especially with his education starting in Sheen Mount Primary School, which since leaving have unveiled a new hall in his honour. (KidsKonnect, 2018). After primary he started secondary education at Emanuel School in Wandsworth where he learned about computer science whilst he was doing his O-levels. He fully found himself when he was doing his degree in Oxford’s Queen’s College, and was often found investing things in his room, one example was when he was caught creating a computer out of an old television set, which he bought from a repair shop. (KidsKonnect, 2018)

Tim Berners-Lee working at Plessey Communications

(Chant, 2021)

After obtaining his bachelor's degree in physics at Oxford, he started his career at a telecommunications company called Plessey. Whilst here one of his first official inventions involved the innovation of a typesetting software for printers. During this period Tim Berners-Lee spent a lot of his time working on distributed transaction systems & message relays. (famousscientists.org, 2021). By this stage he already had quite an established knowledge in industry which he would use to go further and invent innovations which would later change the world.

Adult Life

After his successful tenure at Plessey communications, he started work as an independent contractor at CERN which was a European council for nuclear research. It was during his time here he had the idea of a lifetime. Whilst working at CERN, he developed a new program called ‘Enquire’. It was a simple hypertext program which would later lay the conceptual foundation for the development of the ‘World Wide Web.’ (Thefamouspeople.com, 2017) After a brief departure from CERN he returned back in 1984 after spending a few years at John Pooles Image Computer Systems.

During his time here he was given first hand experience in computer networking, some of the work that took place in this sector included real-time control firmware, graphics, and communications software. (Thefamouspeople.com, 2017) Upon his return to CERN, he noticed that the company had a problem. CERN had a massive employee base, which meant a lot of work was being done, but there was no proper way of sharing information and data, which sparked an idea about how to share content more efficiently.

(www.npg.org.uk, n.d.)

How Has Tim-Berners
Lee Changed How We
Communicate?

(Brooker, 2018)

We rely on communication a lot, through daily life and work - it can determine whether you have got a job, attend an online awards ceremony, present important information to a group of people remotely. I guess one reason how Tim Berners-Lee has changed the way we communicate is by how he has made it free and open source to everyone. At a click of a button you can send an email to a friend, accomplice or colleague via the HTTP and FTP protocols.

It has become more apparent than ever the importance of online communication the past 18 months. Throughout the Coronavirus Pandemic, we have relied on services such as Zoom, Microsoft teams and skype to get us through meetings with people and share important information through a safe and recognisable third-party. Not only has it improved how we communicate, it has changed people's lives by how they work or learn, with these technologies it allows us to do a lot more from home making expenses such as travel, parking, food etc much less. Also in terms of online ecommerce with the likes of amazon, ebay and facebook market-place, it is easier than ever to buy and sell items and build a connection with your local community or even set up a small trading business. The way we look at the world has changed now through social media and the online influence it has on politics. People are becoming a lot more aware of the society they live in and sharing their political views to create agendas have become a lot more of a promaneient in recent years.

Inventions

It all started back in 1989 when he asked himself ‘how can we make sending information to people much more simple and effective?’ Tim had a clear vision and thought process and laid out his proposal to be heard. Initially his idea glossed over and was noted ‘Vague but exciting’ on the front of his proposal. (webfoundation, 2021). The project in question was never actually in any relation to what was going on at CERN, but he was spared some time to work on it in the background, along with his work at CERN. Tim Berners-Lee quickly got to work taking this idea further and begun putting it into action in September 1990, incidentially, it was created using one of Steve Jobs’ NeXT computers. (webfoundation, 2021).

1989

First Proposal Of HTML

It took him less than a month to establish the three main technologies needed to create this idea. He created HTML, which is a coding language to create markup on webpages and build an overall structure of a web page. He also created the URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) which we know today as URL, or the unique name/identifier to your website. And finally HTTP - also known as the hypertext protocol. (https://facebook.com/oasdom, 2016)

1990

Creation Of HTML

Something which Tim Berners-Lee was always advocating was making sure all of the code being used at CERN was open source and free to use to the public. On 30th April 1993 CERN issued a public statement stating that the three components of Web software were to be made open source to the public which in turn sparked a global wave of creativity, collaboration and innovation never seen before. CERN would retain the copyright to protect the software from appropriation. In 2014, the World Wide Web reached it’s 25th birthday and at that point almost two in 5 people around the world were using it on a daily. (webfoundation, 2021).

1993

Agreement Was Reached To Make The Code Open Source

By this point he knew he was on to something, he created in a sense a new revolution which would change the way we communicate and view information for ever. In 1994 after leaving CERN for the final time he set to work creating the W3C (Word Wide Web Consortium). (www.cs.mcgill.ca, n.d.). The main aim for the W3C is to set standards in web, these can range from compatibility, accessibility and development guidelines to make sure that everything which is being published to the web is appropriate and fits into their standards to help people view it, whom of which may rely on assistance. One of the best descriptions of the web standards that i’ve read was: “Web standards save us time, as designers and allow us to sleep at night, safe in the knowledge that our carefully crafted masterpiece is accessible regardless of who’s viewing it on which browser and which platform” (Murphy and Nicklas Persson, 2009).

1994

Creation Of The W3C

Personal Life

One of his most personal achievements happened in June 2009, when the then British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced that Berners-Lee, together with Nigel Shadbolt, would work within the government to allow for quick and accessible data free to the public. (Wikipedia Contributors, 2019).

Later in 2016 he went back to Oxford to become a research fellow for the Department of Computer Science. In 2004 he proudly received his knighthood from queen Elizabeth II for his amazing work in being one of the biggest pioneers in web. (Wikipedia Contributors, 2019).