The greatest invention of mankind
Imagine how your world will be like without the Internet, and how will you live your days from the simplest details to the most complex without it. It has become a priority of life in our time, and the credit goes back to the inventor of the Internet, Tim Berners-Lee. He never expected that what he did at the end of the 1980s and at the beginning of the 1990s will change the world forever.
Timothy John Berners-Lee, also know as Tim Berners-Lee was born in London, England in 1955. He was one of four children, and his parents were working on the first commercially built computer.
His Career
Berners completed his studies then studied at Oxford University to graduate in 1976 holding a bachelor’s degree in physics. After graduation, Berners started his career at the company Plessey for two years, which is one of the largest telecommunications companies in Great Britain. Then he moved to another corporation where he created a software for smart printing, multi-tasking operating systems and data processing.
In 1980, Berners joined CERN as an independent contractor in Switzerland, which is the largest laboratory of physics in the world, then He served as the Founding Director of Image Computer Systems Ltd in 1981-1984.
In 1989, Berners lunched his project which includes the World Wide Web. Then later he had the idea of hypertext, so he connected it with domain name system and Transmission Control Protocol ideas, so he created the first website for CERN laboratory in 1991.
Berners laid the foundations of the first independent software to browse the internet to be the first release of World Wide Web as it is know nowadays. Berners’s invention made the world smaller as if it were a small village where all the people be together. They are now able to know the cultures and news of the others easily through the invention that may be the greatest invention of mankind.
In 1994, John Berners-Lee founded Internet Companies Association and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) that is the most important international organization to set standards for the World Wide Web, then joined computer science lab in the same year in Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Despite the passage of a quarter century since John Berners-Lee invented the internet; however, he still has many concerns about the dangers of what he has invented. During the many occasions in which he spoke,Berners disclosed somethings that bother him in the internet and and the disadvantages that raise his fears.
In 2015, coinciding with the Facebook announcement about offering free internet without HTTPS Encryption, Berners said that this service is just a new step to monopolize and control poor people minds pointing out that Facebook wants to monopolize the world and control the minds. He also accused the western governments of hypocrisy for spying on the Internet while giving a lessons to the leaders of other countries that practice repression around the world, and in fact, they are doing the same.
Awards
Berners received many awards such as Millennium Technology Award from Technology Academy Finland in Helsinki, and it was one million euro fulfilling the most important condition to receive the award which is improving the humans life and making their life better. He also received awards and honours like, Princess of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research, Charles Stark Draper Prize, Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, Wallace McDowall Award and many other awards.
In 2004, Berners was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II, and he also received a special reception at the opening ceremony of London Olympics in 2012 as the “Inventor of the World Wide Web”. Berners received UNESCO Niels Bohr Medal, and he was in Time magazine’s list of the 100 Most Important People of the 20th century.
The personal life
In 1990, Berners was married to Nancy Carlson and had two children until they divorced in 2011, then he married again in 2014 the director of the World Wide Web Foundation and his fellow at Harvard, Rosemary Leith.
The idea that always dominated Berners’s brain is that the web should be available for all the people and without any restrictions, because he know that if anyone owned it, it will be able to reap huge sums of money in addition to the superior ability to control the minds of humans, and this is contrary to his deep belief in freedom of access and the transfer of information in its various forms to contribute to the development of knowledge and to be a real nucleus of communication between humans, and the most important goal is to develop the web significantly, and this is what he has already achieved.
