Sir Tim Berners-Lee is a British computer scientist. He was born in London, and his parents were early computer scientists, working on one of the earliest computers.
Growing up, Sir Tim was interested in trains and had a model railway in his bedroom. He recalls:
“I made some electronic gadgets to control the trains. Then I ended up getting more interested in electronics than trains. Later on, when I was in college I made a computer out of an old television set.”
After graduating from Oxford University, Berners-Lee became a software engineer at CERN, the large particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. Scientists come from all over the world to use its accelerators, but Sir Tim noticed that they were having difficulty sharing information.
“In those days, there was different information on different computers, but you had to log on to different computers to get at it. Also, sometimes you had to learn a different program on each computer. Often it was just easier to go and ask people when they were having coffee…”, Tim says.
Tim thought he saw a way to solve this problem – one that he could see could also have much broader applications. Already, millions of computers were being connected together through the fast-developing internet and Berners-Lee realised they could share information by exploiting an emerging technology called hypertext.
In March 1989, Tim laid out his vision for what would become the web in a document called “Information Management: A Proposal”. Believe it or not, Tim’s initial proposal was not immediately accepted. In fact, his boss at the time, Mike Sendall, noted the words “Vague but exciting” on the cover. The web was never an official CERN project, but Mike managed to give Tim time to work on it in September 1990. He began work using a NeXT computer, one of Steve Jobs’ early products.
Tim’s original proposal. Image: CERN
By October of 1990, Tim had written the three fundamental technologies that remain the foundation of today’s web (and which you may have seen appear on parts of your web browser):
- HTML: HyperText Markup Language. The markup (formatting) language for the web.
- URI: Uniform Resource Identifier. A kind of “address” that is unique and used to identify to each resource on the web. It is also commonly called a URL.
- Hypertext Transfer Protocol. Allows for the retrieval of linked resources from across the web.
Tim also wrote the first web page editor/browser (“WorldWideWeb.app”) and the first web server (“httpd“). By the end of 1990, the first web page was served on the open internet, and in 1991, people outside of CERN were invited to join this new web community.
As the web began to grow, Tim realised that its true potential would only be unleashed if anyone, anywhere could use it without paying a fee or having to ask for permission.
He explains: “Had the technology been proprietary, and in my total control, it would probably not have taken off. You can’t propose that something be a universal space and at the same time keep control of it.”
So, Tim and others advocated to ensure that CERN would agree to make the underlying code available on a royalty-free basis, forever. This decision was announced in April 1993, and sparked a global wave of creativity, collaboration and innovation never seen before. In 2003, the companies developing new web standards committed to a Royalty Free Policy for their work. In 2014, the year we celebrated the web’s 25th birthday, almost two in five people around the world were using it.
Tim moved from CERN to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1994 to found the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an international community devoted to developing open web standards. He remains the Director of W3C to this day.
The early web community produced some revolutionary ideas that are now spreading far beyond the technology sector:
- Decentralisation: No permission is needed from a central authority to post anything on the web, there is no central controlling node, and so no single point of failure … and no “kill switch”! This also implies freedom from indiscriminate censorship and surveillance.
- Non-discrimination: If I pay to connect to the internet with a certain quality of service, and you pay to connect with that or a greater quality of service, then we can both communicate at the same level. This principle of equity is also known as Net Neutrality.
- Bottom-up design: Instead of code being written and controlled by a small group of experts, it was developed in full view of everyone, encouraging maximum participation and experimentation.
- Universality: For anyone to be able to publish anything on the web, all the computers involved have to speak the same languages to each other, no matter what different hardware people are using; where they live; or what cultural and political beliefs they have. In this way, the web breaks down silos while still allowing diversity to flourish.
- Consensus: For universal standards to work, everyone had to agree to use them. Tim and others achieved this consensus by giving everyone a say in creating the standards, through a transparent, participatory process at W3C.
New permutations of these ideas are giving rise to exciting new approaches in fields as diverse as information (Open Data), politics (Open Government), scientific research (Open Access), education, and culture (Free Culture). But to date we have only scratched the surface of how these principles could change society and politics for the better.
In 2009, Sir Tim co-founded the World Wide Web Foundation with Rosemary Leith. The Web Foundation is fighting for the web we want: a web that is safe, empowering and for everyone.
Please do explore our site and our work. We hope you’ll be inspired by our vision and decide to take action. Remember, as Tim tweeted during the Olympics Opening Ceremony in 2012, “This is for Everyone”.
This is for everyone #london2012#oneweb#openingceremony@webfoundation@w3c
— Tim Berners-Lee (@timberners_lee) July 27, 2012
Important Note: This text is intended as a brief introduction to the history of the web. For a more detailed account, you might want to consider reading:
Thanks to the efforts of Paul Kunz and Louise Addis, the first Web server in the US came online in December 1991, once again in a particle physics laboratory: the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in California. At this stage, there were essentially only two kinds of browser. One was the original development version, which was sophisticated but available only on NeXT machines. The other was the ‘line-mode’ browser, which was easy to install and run on any platform but limited in power and user-friendliness. It was clear that the small team at CERN could not do all the work needed to develop the system further, so Berners-Lee launched a plea via the internet for other developers to join in. Several individuals wrote browsers, mostly for the X-Window System. Notable among these were MIDAS by Tony Johnson from SLAC, Viola by Pei Wei from technical publisher O'Reilly Books, and Erwise by Finnish students from Helsinki University of Technology.
Early in 1993, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois released a first version of its Mosaic browser. This software ran in the X Window System environment, popular in the research community, and offered friendly window-based interaction. Shortly afterwards the NCSA released versions also for the PC and Macintosh environments. The existence of reliable user-friendly browsers on these popular computers had an immediate impact on the spread of the WWW. The European Commission approved its first web project (WISE) at the end of the same year, with CERN as one of the partners. On 30 April 1993, CERN made the source code of WorldWideWeb available on a royalty-free basis, making it free software. By late 1993 there were over 500 known web servers, and the WWW accounted for 1% of internet traffic, which seemed a lot in those days (the rest was remote access, e-mail and file transfer). 1994 was the “Year of the Web”. Initiated by Robert Cailliau, the First International World Wide Web conference was held at CERN in May. It was attended by 380 users and developers, and was hailed as the “Woodstock of the Web”.
As 1994 progressed, stories about the Web hit the media. A second conference, attended by 1300 people, was held in the US in October, organised by the NCSA and the newly-formed International WWW Conference Committee (IW3C2). By the end of 1994, the Web had 10 000 servers - 2000 of which were commercial - and 10 million users. Traffic was equivalent to shipping the entire collected works of Shakespeare every second. The technology was continually extended to cater for new needs. Security and tools for e-commerce were the most important features soon to be added.
Cards Return to Set Details
Term | Definition organizations that cannot adapt to new demands places on them for surviving in the information age are doomed to extinction | |
|
Term | Definition a new way of doing things that initially does not meet the needs of existing customers - opens new markets and destroys old ones (future) | |
|
Term | Definition produces an improved product customers are eager to buy and provide us with better, faster, and cheaper products in eastablished markets (current) | |
|
Term | Definition massive network that connects computers all over the world and allows them to communicate with one another | |
|
Term | Definition provides access to Internet information through documents )including text, graphics, audio, and video files) that use a special formatting language called HTML | |
|
Term Hypertext markup language (HTML) | | Definition links documents, allowing users to move from one to another simply by clicking on a hot spot or link | |
|
Term | Definition allow users to acces the WWW (Internet Explorer or Mozilla's Firefox) | |
|
Term Hypertext transport protocol (HTTP) | | Definition the Internet protocol Web browsers use to request and display Web pages using universal resource locators | |
|
Term universal resource locator (URL) | | Definition the address of a file or resource on the Web such as www.apple.com | |
|
Term | Definition a term to refer to the World Wide Web during its first few years of operation between 1991 and 2003 | |
|
Term | Definition the buying and selling of goods and services over the Internet | |
|
Term | Definition includes ecommerce along with all activities related to internal and external business operations (such as servicing customer accounts, collaborating with partners, and exchaning real-time information) | |
|
Term | Definition occurs when a new radical form of business enters the market that reshapes the way companies and organizations behave | |
|
Term | Definition refers to the depth and breadth of details contained in a piece of textual, graphic, audio, or video information | |
|
Term | Definition measures the number of people a firm can communicate with all over the world | |
|
Term | Definition the ability of an organization to tailor its products or services to the customers' specificatioins | |
|
Term | Definition occures when a company knows enough about a customer's likes and silikes that i can fashion offers more likely to appeal to that person | |
|
Term | Definition strategy that demonstrates how niche products can have viable and profitable business models when selling via ebusiness (refers to the tail of a typical sales curve) | |
|
Term | Definition agents, software, or businesses that provide a trading infrastructure bring buyers and sellers together | |
|
Term | Definition occurs when a business sells directly to the customer online and cuts out the intermediary | |
|
Term | Definition steps are added to the value chain as new players find ways to add value to the business process | |
|
Term | Definition the creation of new kinds of intermediaries that simply could not have existed before the advent of ebusiness | |
|
Term | Definition measures advertising effectiveness by counting visitor interactions with the target ad, including time spent viewing the ad, number of pages viewed, and the number of repeat visits to the advertisement | |
|
Term | Definition records the pattern of a consumer's navigation through a site | |
|
Term | Definition a plan that details how a company creates, delivers, and generates revenues | |
|
Term | Definition a plan that details how a company creates, delivers, and generates revenues on the Internet | |
|
Term Business-to-business (B2B) | | Definition applies to businesses buying from and selling to each other over the Internet - 80% of al online business (medical billing service, software sales and licensing, virtual assistant businesses) | |
|
Term Business-to-consumer (B2C) | | Definition applies to any business that sells its products or services directly to consumers online | |
|
Term eshop (or estore, or etailer) | | Definition an online version of a retail store where customers can shop at any hour | |
|
Term Consumer-to-consumer (C2C) | | Definition applies to customers offering goods and services to each other on the Internet | |
|
Term Internet service provider (ISP) | | Definition a company that provides acces to the Internet for a monthly fee (like AOL, AT&T, Comcast, Earthlink, and Netzero) | |
|
Term | Definition occurs when a system updates information at the same rate it receives it | |
|
Term instant messaging (IMing) | | Definition a service that enables instant or real-time communication between people | |
|
Term | Definition converts an audio broadcast to a digital music player | |
|
Term Web conferencing (webinar) | | Definition blends videoconferencing with document sharing and allows the user to deliver a presentation over the Web to a group of geographically dispersed participants | |
|
Term content management systems (CMS) | | Definition help companies manage the creation, storage, editing, and publication of their website content | |
|
Term | Definition the scientific classification of organisms into groups based on simliarities of structure or origin | |
|
Term | Definition the set of ideas about how all information in a given context should be organized | |
|
Term | Definition the next generation of Internet use- a more matures, distinctive coominications platform characterized by new qualities such as collaboration, sharing, and free | |
|
Term | Definition consister of nonproprietary hardware and software based on publicly known standards that allows their parties to create add-on products tp plug into or interoperate with the system | |
|
Term | Definition constain instructions written by a programmer specifying the actions to pe performs by computer software | |
|
Term | Definition refers to any software whose source code is made available free for any third party to review and modify | |
|
Term Usr-contributed content (user-generated content) | | Definition created and updated by many users for many users (Flickr, Wikipedia, YouTube) | |
|
Term | Definition a user-generated system where buyers post feedback on sellers | |
|
Term | Definition a set of tools that supports the work of teams or groups by facilitating the sharing and flow of information | |
|
Term | Definition collaborating and tapping into the core knowledge of all employees, partners, and customers | |
|
Term knowledge management (KM) | | Definition most common form of collective intelligence, which involved capturing, classifying, evaluating, retrieving, and sharing information assests in a way that provides contect for effective decisions and actions | |
|
Term knowledge management system (KMS) | | Definition supports the capturing, organization, and dissemination of knowledge throught an organization goal is that everyone wins | |
|
Term | Definition consists of anything that can be documented, archived, and codified, often with the help of IT (patents, trademarks, business plans, marketing research, and customer lists) | |
|
Term | Definition the knowledge contained in people's heads challenge is figure out how to recognize, generate, share, and manage this knowledge | |
|
Term | Definition |
|
Term asynchronous communications | | Definition communication such as email in which the message and the response do not occur at the same time | |
|
Term synchronous communication | | Definition communications that occur at the same time such as IM or chat | |
|
Term | Definition refers to websites that rely on user participation and user-contributed content (Facebook, YouTube) | |
|
Term | Definition an application that connects people by matching profile information | |
|
Term | Definition the practice of expanding your business and/or social contracts by constucting a personal network. provides: 1. abilitiy to create and maitain a profile that serves as an online identity within the environment 2. ability to create connections between other people within the network | |
|
Term social networking analysis (SNA) | | Definition maps group contacts (personal and professional) identifying who knows each other and who works together | |
|
Term | Definition spacific keywords or phrases incorporated into website contect for means of classification or taxonomy | |
|
Term | Definition the collaborative activity of marking shared online content with keywords or tags as a way to organize it for future navigation, filtering or search | |
|
Term | Definition similar to taxonomy except that crowdsourcing determines the tags or keyword-based classification system | |
|
Term | Definition a locally stored URL or the address of a file or Internet page saved as a shortcut | |
|
Term | Definition allows users to share, organize, search, and manage bookmarks | |
|
Term | Definition an online journal that allows users to post their own comments, graphics, and video | |
|
Term | Definition the practice of sending brief posts (140 to 200 characters) to a personal blog, either publicly or to a private group of subscibers who can read the posts as IMs or text messages | |
|
Term real simple syndication (RSS) | | Definition a Web format used to publish frequently updated works such as blogs, new headlines, audio, and video, in the standardize format | |
|
Term | Definition (Hawaiian for quick) a type of collabortive Web page that allows users to add, remove, and change contentm which can easily be organized and reorganized as required | |
|
Term | Definition describes how products in a network increase in value to users as a number of users increases | |
|
Term | Definition a website or Web application that uses content from more than one source to create a completely new product or service | |
|
Term application programming interface (API) | | Definition a set of routines, protocols, and tools for building software applications | |
|
Term | Definition are WYSIWYG or WhatYouSeeIsWhatYouGet tools | |
|
Term | Definition a component of Web 3.0 that describes things in a way that computers can udnerstand | |
|
Term | Definition involves the use of strategies and technologies to transform government(s) by improving the delivery of servies and enhancing the quality of interaction between the citizen-consumer within all branches of government | |
|
Term mobilee business (mbusiness/mcommerce) | | Definition the ability to purchase goods and services through a wireless Internet-enabled device | |
|
Supporting users have an ad free experience!