World Wide Web and Tim Berners-Lee
Today we are
sitting at home and managing business from around the world. We are able to
communicate remotely with our offices elsewhere in the world with click of a
mouse or with the touch of a finger. We see our people live on our computer
screens and talk to them in real time. We are able to read, understand and analyze financial matters around the world and make our own investment plans.
We can transfer money from anywhere to anywhere else in real time. Virtual
payment processors have come handy to transact money on line. We can even do a
complicated surgery with the help of high end computer techniques. We can share
ides, education, libraries, messages and the list of what we can do without moving from the
our place. It is all possible because of the great invention of 'World
Wide Web' and the 'Internet'. Thanks to Berners-Lee for
providing us these comforts through his great invention. The world became small
and handy.
The global hub in which all of us
are living today is a brain child of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, also known as
"TimBL, the inventor of World
Wide Web. Today we can not dream a minute with out an Internet, World Wide Web,
and a computer. We have come a long way from cave age to internet age with the help of great
achievements of scientists who stood as strong pillars to the modern world. With
World Wide Web distances disappeared between countries, continents and people can interact and exchange virtually anything. Have we ever imagined to
see and chat with our kith and kin else where in the globe with the touch of a
button? On line entertainment, online music, online games, online education,
online libraries, online information to share between people, among groups is a
small list of benefits of World Wide Web.
Tim Berners-Lee is a British scientist at CERN (The European
Organization for Nuclear Research) invented World Wide Web (WWW) in 1989, which
was an offshoot developed to share information between scientists in
universities and institutes around the world.
In Tim’s own words on World Wide Web is "I just had to
take the hypertext idea and connect it to the Transmission Control Protocol and
domain name system ideas and—ta-da!—the World Wide Web ... Creating the web was
really an act of desperation, because the situation without it was very
difficult when I was working at CERN later. Most of the technology involved in
the web, like the hypertext, like the Internet, multifont text objects, had all
been designed already. I just had to put them together. It was a step of
generalising, going to a higher level of abstraction, thinking about all the
documentation systems out there as being possibly part of a larger imaginary
documentation system."
Tim dedicated the World Wide Web at CERN to World Wide Web
project itself and was hosted on Berners-Lee's NeXT computer on 30 April 1993. CERN put the World
Wide Web software in the public domain and released the next version with open license. With this advancement the software required to run a web server freely
available, along with a basic browser and a library of code, the web was
allowed to flourish.
Berners-Lee is holding many positions today
- Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C): W3C maintains standards, design
- Founder Professor: 3Com
- Professor: Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Laboratory for Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence (CSAIL) at the MIT
- Head: Decentralized Information Group (DIG)
- Professor: Electronics and Computer Science Department at the University of Southampton, UK.
Is not Sir Tim Berners-Lee a true inspiration
to one and all?
References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee