Sir Timothy John "Tim" Berners-Lee (Inventors)

(born 8 June 1955) is often seen as the father / inventor of the internet. It was Tim berners Lee who established the first successful connection between an http client and server via the internet.  Tim Berners-Lee's parents, both mathematicians, were employed together on the team that built the Manchester Mark 1, one of the earliest computers. They taught their son to use mathematics everywhere, even at the dinner table. Berners-Lee attended Sheen Mount Primary School, before moving on to study his O-Levels and A-Levels at Emanuel School in Battersea, where a computer centre is dedicated in his name.

He is alumnus of The Queen's College, Oxford. While at Queen's, Berners-Lee built a computer with a soldering iron, TTL gates, an M6800 processor and an old television. During his time at university, he was caught hacking with a friend and was subsequently banned from using the university computer. He graduated in 1976 with a degree in physics.

He met his first wife Jane while at Oxford and they married soon after they started work in Poole. After graduation, Berners-Lee was employed at Plessey Controls Limited in Poole as a programmer. Jane also worked at Plessey Telecommunications Limited in Poole. In 1978, he worked at D.G. Nash Limited (also in Poole) where he wrote typesetting software.

Personal life

Berners-Lee currently lives in Lexington, Massachusetts (USA), is married to Nancy Carlson, and has two children, Alice and Ben.

He left the Church of England, a religion in which he had been brought up, as a teenager just after being confirmed because he could not "believe in all kinds of unbelievable things." He and his family eventually found a Unitarian Universalist church while they were living in Boston.

Timeline of Time Berners Lee

1976 A Physics graduate of The Queen's College, Oxford University, UK. Principal engineer with Plessey Telecommunications in Poole, Dorset, UK.

1980 First hypertext system called "Enquire"

1981–1984 Director of Image Computer Systems

1984 Started at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland.

1989 Writes his proposal for a global hypertext system.

1990 Writes the World Wide Web server, and client software for NeXTStep.

1995 Received a "Kilby Young Innovator" award by the The Kilby Awards Foundation and was a co-recipient of the ACM Software Systems Award.

1996, July Was awarded a Distinguished Fellowship of the British Computer Society

Currently The Director of the W3C and also at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology the 3Com Founders Professor in the School of Engineering and at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (MIT CSAIL).

A director of The Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI),[5] and a member of the advisory board of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence

Current life

In 2001, he became a patron of the East Dorset Heritage Trust having previously lived in Colehill in Wimborne, East Dorset, UK.

In December 2004 he accepted a chair in Computer Science at the School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, UK, to work on his new project — the Semantic Web.

Berners-Lee believes the future of Semantic Web holds immense potential for how machines will collaborate in the coming days. In an interview with an Indian publication, he shared his views as:

"It is evolving at the moment. The data Web is in small stages, but it is a reality, for instance there is a Web of data about all kinds of things, like there is a Web of data about proteins, it is in very early stages. When it comes to publicly accessible data, there is an explosion of data Web in the life sciences community. When you look about data for proteins and genes, and cell biology and biological pathways, lots of companies are very excited. We have a healthcare and life sciences interest group at the Consortium, which is coordinating lot of interest out there."

He has also become one of the pioneer voices in favour of Net Neutrality.

He feels that ISP's should not intercept customers' browsing activities, and has such strong views about this that he would change ISP's to get away from such activities.