Thinking Differently Hero: Tim Berners-Lee

Facebook has inspired an Oscar nominated film, Twitter is being used to crowdsource radiation levels in Japan and the Royal Wedding is to be streamed live around the world. The internet is now woven seamlessly into our every-day lives, but none of this would have been possible without the work of a gentleman from London.

Tim Berners-Lee built his first computer using a soldering iron, TTL gates, an M6800 processor and an old television whilst he was a young man studying for a degree in Physics at Oxford University. On graduating he went on to work for companies involved in developing barcodes and data transfer technologies, but the world changed when he perfected his 1989 brainwave of the creation of a global information space.

Inspired by his then employer’s clunky internal communication system Berners-Lee imagined a tool that would allow researchers from across the world to access and gather information and data. Research could be made available in days rather than months and scientists from across the world could effortlessly contribute suggestions and input into other scientist’s findings speeding up the whole scientific process.

Finally in Tim Berners-Lee wrote the languages that made this information transfer possible: HTML, HTTP, and URL. With all this in place Berners-Lee still had no official interest in the project, but soldiered ahead and in 1991 set up the first web server for his employer CERN. Info.cern.ch was the address of the world's first-ever web site and web server, running on a NeXT computer at CERN. The first web page address was http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html, centred on information regarding the “World Wide Web project.” Visitors could learn more about hypertext, technical details for creating their own webpage, and even an explanation on how to search the Web for information. As interest from around the world increased and other people set up their own web servers. Berners-Lee linked all the web spaces to his own and the internet as we know it began to form.

Unlike a lot of computer entrepreneurs Berners-Lee did not attempt to make money from his invention. He made his idea available freely, with no patent and no royalties due so that it could easily be adopted by anyone and in 2008 he became the Director of the World Wide Web Foundation, in an effort to fund and coordinate efforts to further the potential of the Web to benefit society.

That’s some impressive Thinking.