My Unsung Hero of the Internet

My Unsung Hero of the Internet



Tim Berners-Lee, or we should say Sir Tim, is often seen as the father of the World Wide Web as we know it. He invented and was the first to establish a connection between the http client and Internet server.



Berners-Lee studied at Queen’s College in Oxford. Rumour has it, that while he attended Queen's College, he and one of his friends were caught hacking and then banned from the university computer. Berners-Lee graduated from Queens in 1976 with a degree in Physics. Not even being banned from the university computer stopped the vision developing within Tim Berners-Lee's mind.



Tim Berners-Lee's life has been full. Here are some time events from the 70’s.



-1976 Physics graduate of Oxford and principal engineer with Plessey Control Limited.

-1980 Invented the system Enquire, the first hypertext system.

-1981-1984 Director of Image Computer Systems.

-1984 Started at CERN, which is located in Geneva, Switzerland.

-1989 Writes his proposal for the first global hypertext system.

-1990 Writes the World Wide Web and software for NeXTstep.

-1995 Received the Kilby Young Innovator Award and was co-recipient of the ACM Software Systems Award.



He is the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C.), a web standards organisation, set up in 1994



He was knighted in 2004 and in 2007 was awarded the "Order of Merit"



In 2009 he became a director of the World Wide Web Foundation, basically this is a foundation to improve the web for the future, to benefit humanity.



Had Tim Berners-Lee not dreamed the bigger dream and stayed within the confines of his first job, the Internet, as we know it may not be as readily available as it is today. Yes, sure someone else would have developed the World Wide Web perhaps later on, but Berners-Lee took his love of mathematics and within his own vision created the web.



We know he didn’t create the WWW with business in mind, and lucky for us he didn’t. For this is a man who invented the future, and soon will be the biggest industry than anything the world has known.



Have you ever thought that if he decided to take his intellectual property rights he would be by far the richest man on earth today? Instead he has focused all his work for the common good of mankind.



Without Sir Tim, the WWW and the Internet, hundreds of thousands of companies wouldn’t be where they are today. As for us Internet Marketers and all the Internet Entrepreneurs out there, well I need say no more. Only let us all raise our glasses to Internet’s unsung hero.

--- Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

Written by Ray Stentaford