Tim
Berners-Lee, the London-born scientist who invented
the World Wide Web, was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II on Friday,
July 16, 2004. He received the knighthood in recognition of his
services to the development of the Internet through the invention
of the Web, a system to organize, link and browse pages on the
Internet. The
Queen made the 49-year-old scientist a knight commander, the second-highest
rank of the Order of the British Empire, in a ceremony at Buckingham
Palace.
Dubbed
the "Father of the Web", he came up with a system over
10 years ago to organize, link and browse net pages. The
famously modest man said he was "quite an ordinary person",
and although it felt strange, he was "honored". Sir
Tim was recently reunited with the machine he used to invent the
web when he e-mailed 80 schools from the UN's summit on the information
society.
The
British scientist, who lives in the US, was told he was getting
the unexpected Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire
in the New Year honors list a few days ago - by telephone, not
by e-mail. He said he never expected his invention would lead
to such an accolade.
The
physicist created his hypertext program, which was to revolutionize
the net, while he was at the particle physics institute, Cern,
in Geneva. The computer code he came up with let scientists easily
share research findings across a computer network. In the early
1990s, it was dubbed the "world wide web", and is still
the basis of the net as we know it.
If
Tim Berners-Lee had decided to patent his idea in 1989, the Internet
would be a different place. Instead, the World Wide Web became
free to anyone who could make use of it. The Internet has many
fathers: Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn, who came up with a system
to let different computer networks interconnect and communicate;
Ray Tomlinson, the creator of e-mail and the "@" symbol;
Ted Nelson, who coined the term hypertext; and scores of others.
But only one person conceived of the World Wide Web
(originally, Berners-Lee called it a "mesh" before
changing it to a "web"). Before him, there were no "browsers,"
nothing known as "hypertext markup language," no "www"
in any Internet address, no "URLs," or uniform resource
locators.
Because
he and his colleague, Robert Cailliau, a Belgian, insisted on
a license-free technology, today a Gateway computer with a Linux
operating system and a browser made by Netscape can see the same
Web page as any other personal computer, system software or Internet
browser. If his employer at the time, CERN, the European Particle
Physics Laboratory in Geneva, had sought royalties, Berners-Lee
said, he thought the world would have 16 different "Webs"
on the Internet today.
Sir
Tim
recently told the BBC World Service's Go Digital program his invention
was "just another program", and that he originally wanted
it to help achieve understanding. "The
original idea of the web was that it should be a collaborative
space where you can communicate through sharing information. The
idea was that by writing something together, and as people worked
on it, they could iron out misunderstanding." Sir Tim said
the honor was an acknowledgement that the net was becoming globally
powerful, and not just a "passing trend".
"There
was a time when people felt the Internet was another world, but
now people realize it's a tool that we use in this world."
He
added that his knighthood proves what can happen to "ordinary
people" who work on things that "happen to work out",
like the web. "What's at stake here is the whole spirit in
which software has been developed to date," he said. "If
you can imagine a computer doing it, then you can write a computer
program to do it. That spirit has been behind so many wonderful
developments. And when you connect that to the spirit of the Internet,
the spirit of openness and sharing, it's terribly stifling to
creativity. It's stifling to the academic side of doing research
and thinking up new ideas; it's stifling to the new industry and
the new enterprises that come out of that."
Sir
Tim currently heads up the World
Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology in Boston, where he is now based as an academic.
SIR
TIM BERNERS-LEE
Born in London in 1955
Studied at Wandsworth's Emanuel School
Read physics at Queen's College, Oxford
Banned from using the university's computer when he and a
friend were caught hacking
Built own computer with old TV, a Motorola microprocessor
and soldering iron
Created web in late 1980s and early 1990s at Cern
Offered it free on the net
Previously awarded an OBE
In 1994 he founded World Wide Web Consortium at MIT
In 1999 he became first holder of the 3Com Founders chair
Time magazine named him one of the top 20 thinkers of the
20th Century
~
Story from BBC NEWS
