Programmer
June 8, 1955
INDUCTED IN THE CLASS 0F 2002
Notable accomplishments:
- Developed the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) that led to the development of the World Wide Web (1989)
- Founded the World Wide Web Consortium (1994)
Quotes:
“We got to the stage (at CERN) where computers were running different operating systems. There were … VAX/VMS-based computers and different flavors of Unix. Now there was a mainframe computer running its own operating system. So there were different flavors of software, different flavors of hardware. They were actually connected. Although the people didn’t in practice transfer files very much from one computer to another, you could if you knew how. So if you knew somebody had written a document that you wanted and it was on another computer and as they were both connected to some sort of network, with enough research and installing enough bits of program you could install things like Telnet – the remote login program – on both and you could Telnet over to another system and run some programs there which would allow you to root about for the information. Eventually you could transfer it back to the terminal you were using. So that wasn’t really a great way to get information. But on the other hand, there was such a potential. There was so much information which was actually sitting there on disks, going around and around, carefully prepared by somebody – lovingly prepared. Documentation of the part they had been working on for the last five years. Lovingly written\ up, with references to other documents – which again, we’d have to go through the same process to find. So once you had the idea that actually this could all be part of one virtual documentation system in which you just click when you want to follow a reference then it becomes pretty compelling. It was difficult to explain to people because (it) was a paradigm shift. The idea that any document could be available variable in a click was just too difficult to explain.” (MIT, 2011)
Suggested reading:
“Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web” by Tim Berners-Lee (2000)
“Tim Berners-Lee: Inventor of the World Wide Web” by Stephanie Sammartino McPherson (2009)
Learn more:
CERN’s history of the World Wide Web
Official biography at W3C.org