Tim Berners-Lee: The World War Web Essay Sample

Imagine a world without the internet or any big corporations like Google. It sounds crazy for anyone in this modern age to think about, but at one time, it was a reality. How would the world today run without this power? How much of the information that we know today would still be unknown? Thankfully, we don’t have to think about these questions because of the invention of the World Wide Web.

Sir Timothy Berners-Lee was born on June 8th, 1955 in London, England. His parents’ names were Mary Lee Woods and Conway Berners-Lee; he had 3 siblings. His parents worked with the very first ever commercial computer, the Ferranti Mark 1. At a young age, he attended Sheen Mount Primary school and continued to then spend 4 years at Emanuel School in southwest London. As a child, he learned all about electronics through playing with his model railway. After graduating from secondary school, he enrolled at the University of Oxford at Queen’s College for 3 years and received a first-class degree in Physics in 1976.

After graduating from there, he found a job as an engineer for Plessey Telecom, which was located in Poole, Dorset. While he was there, he worked on distributed transaction systems, message relays, and bar code technology. In 1978, he moved to D.G. Nash in Ferndown, Dorset (which was run by two of his friends, Dennis Nash and John Poole). While he was there, he created type-setting software for printers and a multitasking operating system. From June to December 1980, he worked for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (or CERN for short) as an independent software engineer. As he worked there, he made a proposal for a project based on “hypertext” which would make the sharing and updating of information by researchers easier and more convenient than ever before. He devised a prototype system called ENQUIRE to demonstrate how it would work (the name came from a Victorian book called “Enquire Within Upon Everything”). He later left CERN in the late 1980s. He became a Director at John Poole’s Image Computer System LTD in Bournemouth, Dorset. For the next three years, he was in charge of the technical side of the company and gained some experience in computer networking, graphics, and communications software. Later on in 1984 (after the first commercial internet “email” system was created), he returned to CERN. By 1989, CERN was the largest internet company in Europe.

In March of 1989, Berner-Lee saw his chance to meld hypertext with the internet and produced his idea named “Information Management: A Proposal”. He proposed this information because he wanted people to be able to share information globally without the need for emails. He named the system the World Wide Web and he also designed/built the first web browser. The first website for this system was built at CERN and published on August 6th, 1991. Its address was “info.cern.ch.” and it ran as a web server and website. The first website contained information about Berners-Lee’s project so that visitors could learn about hypertext (HTTP) and learn about building web pages. Since he did this, more people could make their own web pages. By 1992, there were 50 servers and by 1944, there were over 2 million users. 150,000 new users were being added every month. However, the Web was still heavily used in the academic field. He founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the Laboratory of Computer Science (LCS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston. It was made up of companies that wanted to work together to create Web standards and improve the Web. It was agreed that the technology should be free of royalties and patents. Berners-Lee has served as director of this W3C since it was founded. In 1995, Microsoft produced the first version of Internet Explorer. This commercial browser created enormous growth in websites and web users. The Web was first used for e-commerce in 1997.

In June of 2008, British PM Gordon Brown made the announcement that Berners-Lee (together with Nigel Shadbolt) would be working with the UK government so they could make data more accessible and open to people that needed it on the website “data.gov.uk.” Berners-Lee also holds the founder's chair in Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2016, he joined the Department of Computer Science at Oxford University as a professorial research fellow. Berners-Lee married Nancy Carlson, a programmer analyst, in 1990 and they had two children before they were divorced in 2011. Then later, he married Rosemary Leith, director of the World Wide Web Foundation, in 2014. In 2001, he became a Fellow of the Royal Society and in 2004 he was knighted. He was appointed to the Order of Merit in 2007. In April of 2009, the US National Academy of Sciences elected him as a foreign associate. He has also won the following awards: Millennium Technology Prize (2004), The President's Medal (2006), Turing Award (2017), MacArthur Fellowship (1998), Computer Science Royal Medal (2000), Japan Prize (2002), Marconi Prize (2002), Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering (2013), Princess of Asturias Award for Technical & Scientific Research (2002), Charles Stark Draper Prize (2007), IEEE Computer Society Awards - W. Wallace McDowell Award (1996), IET Mountbatten Medal (1996), Internet Hall of Fame for Innovators (2012), IEEE/RSE James Clerk Maxwell Medal (2008), and Sir Frank Whittle Medal (2001).

This creation obviously affects almost everyone’s day-to-day life in today’s modern world. Without the internet, schools would definitely function way differently than they did today. Workplaces would also run a lot differently. Some inventions might not even have been made, and it would be harder to figure out information. We would not have major sites like google, amazon, etc. Basically, it would be exactly like the world before the worldwide web. Overall, I think this invention was an important one and I think it revolutionized the world.