Father Of The Internet Berners-lee

A Fathers' Day message to Sir Tim Berners-Lee

Dear Sir Tim Berners-Lee,

As the father of the World Wide Web, we think you deserve a Father’s Day message. After all, anyone who’s ever clicked a link, typed those three famous W’s, or even just seen a video on a friend’s screen is, in some way, your child. This, therefore, is a tribute to you, your web and everything we’ve managed to achieve with it.

We’ve come a long way since that fateful day when you implemented the first successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol ( ) client and server via the internet. That was way back in 1990 and what you were doing was on the cutting edge of experimental.

Since then, you’ve been knighted. That was possibly cooler than any of the Beatles getting honours from the Queen. At any rate, it was a more worthwhile knighthood than any of the ones handed out to British civil servants every year. We access the web at lightning-fast speeds and your beloved child has grown far beyond the bounds of its original vision.

That vision was for “a pool of human knowledge, and human culture, which would allow collaborators in remote sites to share their ideas and all aspects of a common project.”

When used properly, the web is all that and much more. On its pages, we do our banking, buy flowers, and, most humanly of all, fall in love.

You know all that already though, you’ve remained a force on the web, overseeing its growth and development through the (WC3) and making sure of its increasing availability through the . You’ve been one of the more attentive fathers in our technological age, even with a child that grows exponentially every year.

You can’t have imagined that kind of growth 21 years ago, can you? Granted, the growth hasn’t been perfect. Some of us have hidden in dusty corners of the web, corrupting it, sullying its vision. I’m not talking about the pages and pages of LOLcats or even Farmville. I’m talking about people who’ve used your beloved project to spread child pornography, to spew forth messages of hate and to misinform. We must all accept some level of responsibility for these deeds.

That’s enough penance for now though. This is supposed to be a celebration of you. At this point in a Fathers’ Day letter, it usual for the child to thank the parent for everything the parent has given them in particular. I can’t pretend to speak with any authority for the capable of accessing the web. So I won’t.

'Father' Of The Internet

Tim Berners-Lee, while working as an independent consultant at a nuclear research laboratory in 1980, developed an innovative way of storing information in a program named Enquire.

That work was later used as the foundation for the development of a global hypertext system – popularly known as the Internet or the World Wide Web.

The WWW was developed to increase the ease with which people could exchange information. This became a reality with the introduction of the first WYSWIG (What You See Is What You Get) hypertext web browser which was written by Tim Berners-Lee.

The advantage of the WWW over previous systems was the lack of a need for a centralized server. In short, this meant that it was just as easy to retrieve, as well as link to, a document that was down the hall as across the world.

This was a huge breakthrough in computing science.

The Web and the first web server were released to the hypertext communities in mid 1991, after being released within CERN in late 1990. In order to achieve a coherent standard for the WWW, specifications for URLs, HTML and HTTP were published.

The universality forced by these specifications, the non-dependence on a central server and decision by Berners-Lee not to profit from the WWW led to a high level of adoption of the technology between 1991-94. A ten fold increase in annual traffic was recorded on the first Web server during this period.

With the advent of the Web, a number of spin-off technologies have emerged. A vast array of server side, client side and database languages have been created to fulfill needs of businesses and individuals.

There are two types of programming languages used on the WWW: client-side and server-side.

A client-side language is executed in the users’ browser and is not dependent upon the Web server. Client-side programming is done almost exclusively with JavaScript.

The great American university, its rise to preeminence, its indispensable national role, why it must be protected

Tim Berners-Lee, Inventor of the World Wide Web

Governing the Internet, the emergence of an international regime

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