Rhianna Flagg

12/3/99

Research project

Hum 142

Prof.Booth

The Man behind the Web

As one goes over the history of the World Wide Web, they soon discover that World Wide Web inventor Timothy J. Berners-Lee is an extremely educated person who takes pride in his work. The Web was designed to allow people to work together by combining their knowledge in a web of hypertext documents (Tim Berners-Lee,1). After understanding what the Web does, I will discuss Berners-Lee's background history, future plans for the web, and his present job with the W3 consortium.

Timothy J. Berners-Lee was born and raised in London, England. He grew up in home with a Protestant upbringing, but he rejected literal Christianity as a teenager because it was incompatible with science. His parents Conway and Mary Berners-Lee were both Mathematicians. They had worked on England's first commercial computer in the 1950's;it was named the ferranti. This family occasionally talked about numbers at different mealtimes, and as a child Tim constructed a replica of the ferranti out of cardboard boxes (Holloway,1-2).

After graduating from Queen's College at Oxford University, England in 1976. Tim Berners-Lee built his first computer with soldering iron, TTL gates, an M6800 processor along with an old television set (Tim Berners-Lee,1). He spent two years with Plessey Telecommunications LTD working on distributed transactions systems, message relays, and barcode technology.

In 1978 Tim left Plessey and joined a team at D.G. Nash LTD where he wrote Type setting software for intelligent printers, and A multiasking operating system. From June-December 1980 he worked on "Enquire." Enquire formed the basis for the future development of the World Wide Web, Tim did this research at CERN, located in Geneva, Switzerland. During 1981-1984 Tim worked at John Poole's Image Computer System's LTD. His work here included firmware, communications, graphics, software, and generic marco-language. Among other things Tim took up a fellowship at CERN to work on distributed real-time systems for scientific data and FASTBUS. FASTBUST system software was designed for a heterogeneous remote procedure call system (Tim Berners-Lee,1).

In 1989 Tim proposed a global hypertext project to be known as the World Wide Web (WWW). He wrote the first WWW server, "httpd." The work was started in October 1990, and the program "World Wide Web" was first made available with in CERN in December. From 1991-1994 Tim continued working on the design of the web, collecting feedback from users across the Internet.

Today Berners-Lee is the first holder of the 3com founders chair, along with being the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The W3C coordinates web development worldwide, with teams from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The consortium takes as its goal to lead the World Wide Web's full potential, ensuring its stability through rapid evolution and revolutionary transformations of its usage (Tim Berners-Lee, 1).

The Web is supposed to be a very interactive medium that was the idea. "But it ain't got that Berners-Lee laments" (Holloway,1). In Tim's world the Web can empower people and transform society by allowing everyone self-expression and access to all information. "The Web can help people to understand the way that others live, love, and are human; to understand the humanity of people"(Holloway, 1). Berners-Lee wants people to remember the important thing is to realize that "the Web is what we make it".

June of 1995, Tim made a special public speech at the Internet Society's annual conference in Honolulu. He outlined several goals for the web. These included greater interoperability, automatability, extensibility effiniciency, scalability, and security (Berners-Lee speaks..,1). He feels that interoperability in terms of open standards is available across different browser platforms. As for automatability and expandability issues, they are linked together to make it possible to harness the vast processing powers of computers rather than to just communicate. Scalability comes by means of new protocols that simplify a transmitted image. " To Berners-Lee, solving these issues within the framework of increased computer processing power, will be the key to the World Wide Web reaching it's full potential" (Berners-Lee speaks..,1-2). As for security on the web people now realize two things 1) They've got some basic security on credit cards, and twenty There are a lot of pieces to the security system, with a lot of development still going on in the up coming years (The interview..,1-4).

In May of 1999 ten years after inventing it Tim still feels that his dream of the Web becoming a "universal space of information" is still far from being realized (Menezes,1). He says the world needs a "Semantic Web"- independent of hardware and software platforms, human interference, language, culture and subjective notions of quality (Menezes,1). In order to develop the web a common format for expression of meta data is crucial. When we have this we can ask the computer not just for information, but why we should believe-it.

When Berners-Lee's original Enquire program made creators of new pages, say what they were about. Enquire would prompt content creators to state something about the relationship between two nodes when they created links. This aspect was lost somehow as the web grew. However Tim predicted that Extensible Markup Language (XML) will play a major role in the Semantic Web's evolution. Meaning "when you can build with others in virtual space it's much more productive than the current forms of interactivity" (Menezes,1).

In conclusion, Tim Berners-Lee has contributed many hours of his time to help the world grow, and learn together by using a simple computer system called the World Wide Web. Because of his background history while growing up Tim has proven to people how exciting the world of science and technology can be. If you just use a little patience and sincere effort throughout your research anything can happen.