In 1989, a young British physicist named Tim Berners-Lee asked his lab for $80,000 to buy some equipment and hire a few programmers for a project he called the World Wide Web.
Last month, the gentle-spoken, sandy-haired inventor’s modestly conceived project won him a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant for $270,000.
As ubiquitous as the Web is, few of its users know of Berners-Lee. Much more media attention has gone to the co-inventor of the Mosaic Web browser, Marc Andreessen, and the company he co-founded to market a commercial browser, Netscape Communications Corp.
But without Berners-Lee’s contribution, the Internet today might still be a place where you typed arcane commands like ftp and gopher, where plain computer-screen text was the primary mode of display, and where you had to know at least some degree of the Unix operating system.
How did Berners-Lee come to conceive of the Web?
“Anyone who has lost track of time when using a computer knows the propensity to dream, the urge to make dreams come true and the tendency to miss lunch,” he once puckishly observed.
Computers held enormous amounts of information, he noted, but organized it poorly. Berners-Lee wanted to develop a simple protocol for linking and searching networks.
Out of that vision grew the uniform resource locator, and the two protocols most readily recognizable by Web users, http and html. The former, hypertext transport protocol, provides file access throughout the Web. The latter, hypertext markup language, is a format that enables display and linking of documents in consistent Web fashion.
Morever, Berners-Lee wanted the Web to run on a variety of computers. His original seven-page proposal listed VT220 terminals (plain text displays available on most desktop computers, including those using DOS), Macintoshes, and Steve Jobs’ NeXT computer, which he used to create the Web.
There was no mention of today’s dominant operating system, Microsoft Windows, which at the time ran well on only a small percentage of PCs and was considered an awkward imitation of the Macintosh.
Berners-Lee’s final objective was altruistic: “Provide the software for the above free of charge to anyone.”
Berners-Lee’s breakthrough was enabled by his penchant for “simplicity, determination and mostly pragmatism in a world full of grandiose but painful false starts,” said Thomas Reardon, an Internet executive at Microsoft Corp.
Others had come up with hyperlinking documents, but Berners-Lee “saw it was the combination (of protocols and the Net) that mattered more than the components,” Reardon added.
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In late 1990, Berners-Lee posted the Web’s initial iteration on the network at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, where he worked. The following summer, he began to notify the Internet community at large of the Web’s existence.
The first browsers, including one by Berners-Lee, displayed text and graphics but not in the magazine-type layout that became common with Mosaic..
A 1976 Oxford University graduate, Berners-Lee became enthralled with the notion of organizing information in the randomly associative way that the brain works, leading him in 1980 to develop a hypertext notebook program he called Enquire for personal use. Never released publicly, Enquire was the conceptual seedbed for the Web.
In 1994, Berners-Lee went to his current post, director of the World Wide Web consortium, a standards body that persuades the Web’s biggest players to agree on new technical advances. He once observed he’s so busy with the Web’s infrastructure that he has little time to do what the typical user does–surfing.
Eventually Berners-Lee will be honored alongside Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Jobs, Andreessen and other pioneers of the Information Age. For now you can find out more about him, naturally, on the Web at http://www.w3.org/People/W3Cpeople.html
Berners-Lee