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 Cent
