Sir Tim Berners-Lee might be the one man that you’ve never heard of, but likely utilize his inventions every day in some way. Born in 1955, computers were always part of family life for Berners-Lee. His family worked on the Ferranti Mark 1, which was the first commercially-built computer. He also loved to play with model railroads as a kid and learned a lot about the way electronics worked from that experience. From there, he began to propose projects that would help to literally change how the world communicates and shares information.
Here is a brief look at the inventions of Tim Berners-Lee:
Hypertext
Take a look at your web browser right now. You see that “http” in front of this website? That’s hypertext and it’s the foundation of every page you visit. You have Berners-Lee to thank for that. He started developing the concept of hypertext around 1980 and realized that the combination of his hypertext and the internet could help to facilitate communication around the world.
The World Wide Web
The joke might be that Al Gore invented the internet, but most folks concur that it was Berners-Lee who came up with the initial concepts and implementation of the first successful communication between a host and a client. The proposal, which occurred in 1989, happened after the internet was actually in existence. What Berners-Lee wanted to do was add hypertext to the internet and use the idea of a domain name system. From there, he worked to launch the first website and made it go live; even helping people to learn more about hypertext and the project gave out the details of how to create a webpage.
The Modern Web Browser
What you’re using to access this article was also initially invented by Berners-Lee. He realized that in order to access a website, people would need a user-friendly method of being able to access an http address. The average person wouldn’t know how to remotely connect to a host and begin communicating. He worked to develop the software components that are now widely used today in a variety of formats and are even available on smartphones and tablets today so that the internet can be accessed almost anywhere.
HTML Coding
Berners-Lee also recognized during the development of the WWW project that there would need to be a concise language that could be replicated by many different websites to create uniformity in the user experience of the internet. To do that, the coding that went into the first website was the first attempts at creating HTML coding that is currently, at the time of this writing, on its 5th update. Through this coding, users could easily access the data on a site and interact with it in a way that would benefit them in the way they needed.
Without his work, the world might still be a global community like it is right now, but it wouldn’t likely be as efficient as it is. The work of Berners-Lee will certainly go down in history as one of this era’s greatest achievements.
Strong proponent of individual liberty and free speech. My goal is to present information that expands our awareness of crucial issues and exposes the manufactured illusion of freedom that we are sold in America. Question everything because nothing is what it seems.
