Web's inventor gets a knighthood

[edesignuk]

The inventor of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee, has been awarded a knighthood for his pioneering work.

Dubbed the "Father of the Web", he came up with a system over 10 years ago to organise, link and browse net pages.

The famously modest man said he was "quite an ordinary person", and although it felt strange, he was "honoured".

Sir Tim was recently reunited with the machine he used to invent the web when he e-mailed 80 schools from the UN's summit on the information society.

 

[iGav]

I always thought the web was invented in the '70's??

 

[eyelikeart]

For military use, yeah. I think maybe this guy was the one to make it so we civilians could use it?

 

[Knox]

Originally posted by eyelikeart
For military use, yeah. I think maybe this guy was the one to make it so we civilians could use it?

I think you're thinking about the Internet in general, which was originally military then used by universities and the rest, rather than specifically the web.

http://www.w3.org/History.html
http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/ShortHistory

 

[hobbes3113]

I thought Al Gore invented the web!?!

 

[wdlove]

Originally posted by hobbes3113
I thought Al Gore invented the web!?!

That was my first thought also. I'm impressed by the humility of Sir Tim. It is just too bad Al couldn't have half of his humility. We are very fortunate that the military/university project became available to civilians like us.

 

[Daveman Deluxe]

Here's the story:

Al Gore was a key player in getting the funding necessary to create infrastructure for the Internet to take off in the U.S. That is all he has ever said and it is absolutely true.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee is the guy that invented hypertext, which is the foundation of the World Wide Web today. "http" stands for "HyperText Transfer Protocol".

Al Gore = critical to the Internet
Sir Tim Berners-Lee = critical to the World Wide Web

 

[Phil Of Mac]

Welllllll the concept of hypertext predates Sir Berners-Lee. Ted Nelson is considered the originator of the hypertext concept. But Sir Tim Berners-Lee *did* implement it the way we see it today.

 

[Doctor Q]

The World Wide Web didn't really take off until you could use it, which happened due to Marc Andreesen and his team at NCSA (the University of Illinois National Center for Supercomputing Applications) in early 1993. That's when they produced Mosaic, the first graphical web browser. It came out first for Unix, then mid-year for Windows and Macintosh. By the end of the year, the die was cast, as they say, and the same development team was off creating Netscape.

 

[alset]

Special thanks to Daveman for correcting the Al Gore bit before it got out of hand. Too many people jump on him for something taken completely out of context.

On another note, so many Knighthoods have been given out, lately, that they seem pretty meaningless. Such and honor shouldn't be trivialized by dishing them out at a rate of ten-per-week.

Dan

 

[4409723]

Originally posted by alset
Special thanks to Daveman for correcting the Al Gore bit before it got out of hand. Too many people jump on him for something taken completely out of context.

On another note, so many Knighthoods have been given out, lately, that they seem pretty meaningless. Such and honor shouldn't be trivialized by dishing them out at a rate of ten-per-week.

Dan

Yes, I just realised that they aren't worth too much when my friend showed me the medal that he owns, which is a real medal that somebody received when they were given a knighthood.

 

[macfreek57]

Originally posted by iGAV
I always thought the web was invented in the '70's??

yeah that's dumd when people saythat (not you). back in the 70's at the pentagon was simply the first time anyone ever thought to network computers. and they did it on a pretty huge scale and integrated all sorts of things into their network that we see in today's.