Tim Berners-Lee
CERN and MIT
- The passion for computers lies in his genes since his parents were both Mathematicians and have been working for the English company Ferranti Inc. to develop one of the first commercial computers.
- Very early he dealt with computer technology and played with blanks, circuits and magnet cards that were laying around.
- During his school years his father came up with the question if it was possible to build a computer, capable of linking information associatively like the human brain, and this question never let him go.
- “In an extreme point of view, the world is nothing but a collection of links.”
- “I like the idea that information is only defined by how and to what it is linked.”
- During his time at CERN he wrote a program called “Enquire”, which was a mnemonic device for his personal use (it helped him to keep track of different people and projects in his laboratory)
- After he finished the development of Enquire, he had a vision of a „global information space“, where information could be stored on computers and linked to be accessible for everybody.
- For researchers at CERN it was difficult to make their work accessible to colleagues, since the documents had to be converted to make them compatible to CERN’s main computer terminal – many scientists avoided this additional work.
- "It would be so much easier if everybody asking me questions all the time could just read my database, and it would be so much nicer if I could find out what these guys are doing by jumping into a similar database of information for them."
- The new system ought to be more decentralised, so everybody could share his information from everywhere.
- In 1989 he turned in a scheme for such an information system at CERN, but he didn’t get a response – he started working anyways and wrote http in 1990
- In this system all documents should have unique addresses, which he called Universal Resource Identifier (URI) – today URL (Uniform Resource Locator)
- Soon he had written a browser called World Wide Web, HTML and the very first webserver (info.cern.ch.).
Tim Berners-Lee
born in 1955 in london
Studied in Oxford
CERN, MIT, W3C
