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Week 4 Homework
Tim Berners-Lee: A Super Cool Human Being
Tim Berners-Lee is credited with creating the world wide web.
In 1984 he was a software developer working for CERN, which at that time was Europe's largest internet server. He had a vision to make sharing of documents across the internet easy and straightforward via a simple, decentralized system. He was inspired to use hypertext, a system to link documents instantly, in conjunction with the internet.
By 1990, Berners-Lee had written Hypertext Transfer Protocol language, introduced Universal Resource Identifiers (URIs), and written a browser program to view the hypertext files. He then also developed the first web server software at CERN which was named info.cern.ch.
When Berners-Lee launched his browser and web server software onto the internet in 1991, it was adopted swiftly all over the world. Other computer engineers began to develop software and contribute to the growth of the worldwide web.
As use of the web boomed, it became important to Berners-Lee to ensure the free and open nature of the web while developing some rules or guidelines for its future growth. In 1994 the first worldwide web conference was held at CERN. It later became headquarted at MIT with Berners-Lee as the chairman. The mission of the W3C (Worldwide Web Consortium) is to develop and agree common protocols for the web. Any organization can be a member and participate in the future of the worldwide web.
Since that time, Berners-Lee has been recognized with numerous awards and honorary degrees from around the world. His contribution has revolutionized communication for humanity.
Currently he is working with the British government to improve the accessibility of information of the web. In the following video from March 2010, Berners-Lee address the audience at TED about what is possible with Open Data sharing.