Sir Tim Berners Lee - Part 1

Timothy John “Tim” Berners Lee – Mystery Man

Nothing to say sometimes; sums up lot more than what many can brief at many times. Tim Berner’s Lee is one of those grand personas, whom I’ve esteemed since the days when I understood the internet world. And nothing but that silent appreciation indeed pleads me to trap something about him into my collections. This compilation certainly worth as it seizes up some of his finest snapshots of life which I came across to over a period of time, indeed difficult to browse at a lone spot.

A physics graduate from the Queen’s college, Oxford University, England at Jus’ 21 years of age (1976) once was caught hacking at college network with a friend & was banned subsequently from using the university computer but who knew that the same person will provide the biggest platform for whole of this planet to hack one day.

Tim is married to Nancy Carlson. They have two children, born 1991 and 1994. His parents were both mathematicians who were part of the team that programmed Manchester University's Mark I, the world's first commercial, stored program computer, sold by Ferranti Ltd. One day when he was in high school Berners-Lee found his dad writing a speech on computers for Basil de Ferranti. Father and son talked about how the human brain has a unique advantage over computers, since it can connect concepts that aren't already associated. For example, if you are walking and see a nice tree, you might think about how cool the park is under the trees, and then think of your backyard, and then decide to plant a tree for shade behind your house. Young Berners-Lee was left with a powerful impression of the potential for computers to be able to link any two pieces of previously unrelated information. He also built a computer using an old television, soldering iron, M6800 processor adjoining all his zeal within.

Plessey Telecommunications Ltd hired him as a programmer in 1976, where he worked for 2 years to join D.G. Nash Ltd. for another two.

It was 1980 when he landed as an independent software consultant at CERN - Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucleaire (World’s largest particle physics laboratory in Geneva). There he wrote a Hypertext program for his personal use to help him remember the connections between thousands of researchers and hundreds of systems at the lab. He named that program as “Enquire” (and called it as a “Memory substitute”) after an old book he found in his house during childhood days; which fascinated him as it magically contained the answer to any problem in the world. He indeed successfully dedicated his life to make that babyhood fascination an actuality.

He left CERN in 1981 and took a fellowship at CERN again in 1984 to work on distributed real-time systems and almost immediately started trying to get the official funding for his hyper-text project. It was in 1989 when he proposed a global hypertext space to be created in which network accessible information could be referred to by a single “Universal Document Identifier (UDI)” and only after getting it sanctioned by his boss “Mike Sendall”, he wrote first www server “httpd” & the first client named “WorldWideWeb”- A point & click editor which ran on the NeXT machines. This work got started in October 1990 & released in summers of 1991 to the High Energy Physics community & hypertext and NeXT communities. A student “Nicolas Pellow” at CERN also made available a “line-mode” browser which could be run on almost all the systems.