Tim Berners-Lee

Tim Berners-Lee is one of the greatest people of our time and the creator of the World Wide Web, whose biography I will describe .Creator of URI, URL, HTTP, HTML, and the World Wide Web and current head of the World Wide Web Consortium. Author of the concept of the semantic web, many other developments in the field of information technology.Tim Berners-Lee was born on June 8, 1955 in London (UK) . 25 years ago in 1991, one of the greatest inventions of mankind was made, which once and for all changed the course of history Timothy John Berners-Lee is from the UK. He was born on June 8, 1955 in London. His parents, Conway Berners-Lee and Mary Lee Woods, were mathematicians. They were also associated with IT: they conducted research in the field of creating one of the first computers - the Manchester Mark I.

In addition, the prerequisites for the invention of the WWW was the idea of ​​the American scientist Vannevar Bush, who came up with the concept of hypertext.

In a broader sense, a hypertext is a literary work, dictionary or encyclopedia, which contains configurations (patterns), the use of which allows you to correlate parts of the text that are not connected by a linear sequence, considering them as the embodiment of semantic unity.

In computer terminology, hypertext is text formed using a markup language with the expectation of using hyperlinks.

A few years after the birth of Tim Berners-Lee, Ted Nelson proposed a "documentary universe" where all the texts ever written by mankind would be linked together by what we would today call "cross-references".

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tim-Berners-Lee

Childhood and youth

At the age of 12, Tim entered the private school Emanuel in the town of Wandsworth. There the boy began to show interest in the exact sciences. After leaving school, he went to college at Oxford. Once he was deprived of access to educational computers for a serious offense - a hacker attack (according to another version, he was caught playing computer games at the computer of the nuclear physics laboratory). In those days, computers were big and computer time was expensive.

This circumstance gave Tim the idea that he could assemble the computer himself. After some time, he got a homemade computer based on the M6800 processor, with an ordinary TV instead of a monitor and a broken calculator instead of a keyboard.

Berners-Lee graduated from Oxford in 1976 with a degree in physics, after which he began his career at Plessey Telecommunications Ltd. in the county of Dorset. The scope of his activity at that time was distributed transactions. After a couple of years, he moved to another company - DG Nash Ltd, where he developed software for printers.

The next place of work played a decisive role in the fate of Tim, and indeed of all mankind. The European Laboratory for Nuclear Research (CERN, CERN) was located in Geneva (Switzerland). There, Berners-Lee developed the Enquire program (the literal translation from English sounds like “interrogator”, “reference” or “notebook”), which used the method of random associations. The principle of its work, in many ways, was the basis for the creation of the World Wide Web.

Tim then worked as a systems architect for three years. And as part of his scientific work at CERN, he developed a number of distributed systems for collecting data.

From 1981 to 1984, Tim Berners-Lee worked for Image Computer Systems Ltd.

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In 1984 he returned to CERN on a fellowship there. During this time, he worked on the FASTBUS system and developed his own RPC (Remote Procedure Call) system. In addition, the Enquire program has undergone a redesign.

At the new stage of development, it had to not only support arbitrary hypertext links, making it easier to search in the database, but also become a multi-user and cross-platform system.

The main task of the new program was to publish hypertext documents that would be interconnected by hyperlinks. This made it possible to significantly facilitate the search for information, its systematization and storage. Initially, the project was supposed to be implemented in the CERN internal network for local research needs, as a modern alternative to the library and other data repositories. At the same time, data download and access to them were possible from any computer connected to the WWW.

The World Wide Web https://www.britannica.com/topic/World-Wide-Web

The first ever communication session between remote computers took place on October 29, 1969 at 9 pm.

Computers Honeywell 516 with 12 kilobytes of RAM were located at a distance of 640 km from each other. Charlie Kline transmitted the word logon letter by letter from Los Angeles. And Bill Duvall received a message at Stanford, reporting into the phone on the reception of each letter. In one session, only three log letters were transmitted, after which the connection was cut off. The system was restored in an hour and a half, and the word was transmitted in full. Against the backdrop of the recent landing of a man on the moon and in an atmosphere of military secrecy, this event remained unnoticed by anyone. But on that day, humanity made a no less significant leap forward than six months before, when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. On October 29, 1969, the history of the Internet began.

Eleven more universities and research centers joined Arpanet in 1970. All of them, to one degree or another, worked for the US Department of Defense.

Universal Language of the World Wide Web

This problem was solved in 1983. The public non-profit organization Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) approved as a mandatory protocol for the exchange of information and control of the correctness of its transmission Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol, TCP / IP.

Since then, all computers in the world have spoken to each other in the same language. After the separation of the military segment and the renaming of Arpanet to the Internet, the network continued to expand at the expense of scientific, commercial and public organizations.

Back in 1971, there were two dozen computers on the network, in 1984 - a thousand, in 1987 - ten thousand, in 1989 - hundreds of thousands.

However, in 1985, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) created its own NSFNET (National Science Foundation Network). NASA and the US Department of Energy took part in the implementation of the project. The network brought together six major research centers equipped with the latest supercomputers. Moreover, it was announced that any American scientist and engineer could connect to these powerful resources. Not surprisingly, the network grew at a fantastic rate.

And in 1990, the former network, the former Arpanet, closed, and the name Internet was inherited by the younger network.

In the early 1990s, the number of Internet users was already in the millions. It is quite understandable that as the number of users increased, the throughput of NSFNET, which had a transmission rate of 1.54 Mbps, began to decrease. And instead of a dispersed structure with low-performance support nodes, a different architecture was adopted.

In 1994, NSF funded the creation of four powerful network access points - NAP (Network Access Point) in San Francisco, New York, Chicago and Washington. Each NAP that regional providers connected to had a throughput of 155 Mbps. (Now this figure is measured in gigabytes). Providers of the lower levels distributed traffic through modem pools with a maximum speed of 54 kb / s.

As a result, a grandiose international network began to take shape, which now consists of dozens of large access points, hundreds of national providers, tens of thousands of large and small providers, as well as servers containing invaluable content. The number of sites has long ago exceeded one hundred million, and the number of users - over a billion and continues to grow rapidly.

All this splendor was created, so to speak, on a voluntary basis and is not subject to state and official international structures. It develops "by itself", that is, with the participation, tutelage and control of public non-profit organizations that exist on membership fees and proceeds from the sale of domain names.

In December 1990, Berners-Lee wrote a browser program and began to offer it online to everyone.

And on August 6, 1991, he opened the first ever website. The site contained a description of the World Wide Web and practical recommendations for creating a web server and working with a browser. Subsequently, as resources began to proliferate on the Web, site number one became the first Internet directory to contain links to other sites.

Thus, the services available on the Internet (FTP - file transfer, e-mail, bulletin boards, chat rooms, newsletters, etc.) were supplemented by a powerful tool that anyone could use. Click with your computer mouse and you will go wherever your heart desires.

On April 30, 1993, free access to all CERN software and hardware developments in the IT field was announced. This caused the exponential growth of the World Wide Web. At the end of 1996, the number of sites exceeded one million. The milestone of 10 million was overcome in 2001, 100 million in 2007.

The first websites were mostly text-based. This is explained by the fact that with the power of personal computers and the data transfer rate, it was difficult to pump and display large amounts of information on the monitor. However, soon, as the capabilities of the equipment expanded, both photographs and video appeared. Social networks flourished. E-commerce has emerged. Advertising is increasingly transferred to the Internet.

A new era has truly begun, which provides mankind with unprecedented opportunities. Including in business.

The terms "World Wide Web" (World Wide Web, www) and "Internet" are often confused, although they are far from the same thing. The Internet - just like a network - was indeed created by the US military and long before the WWW. But the World Wide Web is a project that originated in Europe, within the walls of the Geneva laboratory for nuclear research at CERN, and Berners-Lee was its author. Although, of course, it was the creation of the WWW that provoked the frantic pace of the development of the Internet.

So what is the World Wide Web? This phrase Berners-Lee called the scheme of cross-references in hypertext documents. To put it even more simply, these are web pages with links. That is, each web page is such a document created using a special HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language - Hypertext Markup Language) document. And this document has its own unique link URI / URL (Uniform Resource Identifier - Uniform Resource Identifier), and you can access it using a special program - a browser - via the HTTP protocol (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol - Hypertext Transfer Protocol).

However, it is even more interesting that Berners-Lee worked on WWW on NeXT computers - this name must have seemed familiar to some readers. NeXT is a computer company based on its own operating system, founded by Steve Jobs after he was fired from Apple. The NeXT computer software itself played a significant role in the creation of hypertext - in particular, there was a WYSIWYG editor (What You See Is What You Get - you see what you get). It's funny that with the development of the WWW, the concept of WYSIWYG will be forgotten for a while. In fact, it was the convenience and functionality of the NeXTStep operating system that inspired Tim : https://kids.kiddle.co/Tim_Berners-Lee

At 63, Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, has a life divided into two parts - before and after the creation of the Internet. The first part is marked by the fact that he studied at Oxford King's College, worked at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, and also came up with what later became the World Wide Web. Initially, the main purpose of the Internet was the ability of scientists to exchange data among themselves, but Berners-Lee slightly changed the idea and made the Internet an open and democratic platform that everyone can use.