Sir Timothy John “Tim” Berners-Lee is credited with having invented the World Wide Web. He is an engineer, computer scientist, MIT Professor, in addition to many other titles and positions he now holds. He was born in London England on the 8th of June 1955.
Sir Berners-Lee started what would eventually become the “World Wide Web” as a project concerning “Hypertext” while he worked at CERN in 1980 as an independent contractor. While there, a prototype machine was built (named “Enquire”). Sir Berners-Lee left CERN in December of 1980 and returned in 1984 as a fellow.
While this was going on, the “internet” was well on its way, having been under development since the early 1960’s. By the mid 1970’s various networks were already in place with the “Transmission Control Protocol” (or TCP for short) being defined in 1973 by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn.
By 1989 CERN was the largest internet node in Europe using the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the “Domain name system” (DNS). Sir Berners-Lee decided to merge his Hypertext with TCP. The initial proposal for this was written in March of 1989 and the first successful transmission of information from a hypertext server to a client was achieved in late 1990.
Since its humble beginnings, the World Wide Web has grown in content and capability. How do you use the World Wide Web in your engineering life?
