Tim Berners-Lee: Weaving the World Wide Web
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, born in 1955, is a British computer scientist who invented the World Wide Web. In 1989, while working at CERN, a physics laboratory in Switzerland, he wrote a proposal for a system to share and link documents across computers. By 1990 and 1991 he had built the first web browser and the first web server, and he created the world's first website, info.cern.ch.
The web runs on three core technologies that Tim designed. HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the language used to write web pages. A URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is the unique address of each page. HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) is the set of rules computers follow to request and send pages. Special links called hyperlinks let readers jump from one page to another with a single click.
It is important not to confuse the World Wide Web with the Internet. The Internet is the global network of connected computers, the physical infrastructure of cables, routers, and signals. The Web is a system of linked pages and documents that runs on top of the Internet. Tim Berners-Lee did not invent the Internet; he invented the Web that uses it.
In 1993, Tim and CERN made the web's technology free for everyone, with no royalties or fees. This decision let the web grow explosively around the world. In 1994 he founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to set common standards for the web, and he later launched projects to protect web privacy and promote open data. He was knighted by the Queen for his work.
