Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee, commonly known as TimBL is a British computer scientist who has made unsoundly the biggest revolutionary invention of the 20th century, i.e. he invented the World Wide Web (www). Sir Tim was born on June 8, 1955 to Mary Woods and Conway Berners Lee. He has three siblings and both of his parents have worked on the Ferranti Mark I, the first commercially built computer and that is why he chose this field as he was fascinated by computers from his childhood. He graduated from The Queen’s College of the University of Oxford in 1976 with 1st class degree in physics.
Career
After graduating, he was appointed as an engineer at Plessey, a telecommunication company in Poole. He stood there for 2 years doing distribution on transaction systems, message rally and bar code technology. Later he left Plessey in 1978 and joined D G Nash Ltd where he wrote typesetting software for intelligent printers and multitasking operating system. In late 1970s he became a dependent consultant and worked with many companies including CERN. At CERN he created a programmed called ‘Enquire’ for his own need. This is the programme which in future founded World Wide Web. He then joined john Poole’s Image Computer System Ltd where he gained experience in computer networking. After working there he returned to CERN and saw people are having trouble with sharing information and data with each other. He then realized that something has to been to make data sharing efficient.
1989, he created a proposal of an effective communications system within the organization which later led to the conceptualization of World Wide Web, an information sharing system that could be implemented throughout the world.
The world 1st website, info.cern.ch was created on 6th august 1991, which has information regarding what World Wide Web was and how it can be used for sharing information. He then established World Wide Web Consortium at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s laboratory for computer science in 1994. It was decided by W3C that their technologies can be adopted by anyone in the world.
In 2006, he became the co-director at of the Web Science Trust launched to analyze the World Wide Web and look for more solutions to update its usage and design. He is also the director of World Wide Web foundation. Along with Nigel Shadbolt, he is the reason behind data.gov.uk, a UK government project to make data more accessible for the public.
Awards
He has received the Software System Award from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in 1995. He has also been listed in the 100 Most Important People of the 20th century by the Time Magazine in 1999. He was also made the Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE) in the New Year Honours “for services to the global development of the Internet” in 2004 and was also one of five Internet and Web pioneers awarded the inaugural Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering.
Personal life
While studying physics at oxford, he met Jane and married her, but their marriage ended in a divorce. He then married Nancy, whom he met while working at CERN in 1990 but this marriage too ended after some years. Currently he’s married to Rosemary Lieth who he wed in 2014.
