35 Who Made a Difference: Tim Berners-Lee

First he wrote the code for the World Wide Web. Then he gave it away.

The origins of great inventions

The origins of great inventions are generally more complicated than they appear. Thomas Edison did not make the first light bulb, nor did Samuel Morse build the first electric telegraph. Yet in the case of the British scientist Tim Berners-Lee, the story is unusually straightforward.

In the fall of 1990, he wrote some software with the aim of making it easier for particle physicists to share their results by interlinking documents on different computers.
The first Web site was first put online on 6 August 1991

The first Web site

The first Web site built was at CERN .
It provided an explanation about what the World Wide Web was
how one could own a browser
and how to set up a Web server.
It was also the world's first Web directory

Hypertext and the Internet

In 1989, CERN was the largest Internet node in Europe, and Berners-Lee saw an opportunity to join hypertext with the Internet: "I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the Transmission Control Protocol and domain name system ideas and — ta-da! — the World Wide Web."

Of course, the idea of "hypertext"—linking a word or phrase in one document to another document—was not new. Commentaries on the Torah and even the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci take the form of hypertexts. Much later, once the computer age began, visionaries including Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson proposed elaborate hypertext systems. But Berners-Lee actually implemented his scheme in working software and then released it into the world. He considered calling it Information Mesh, or Mine of Information, but eventually settled on the name World Wide Web.

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