'I'm Devastated': World Wide Web Creator Tim Berners-Lee on How We Lost the Internet. British scientists British scientist creator of the world wide web

Berners-Lee, Timothy John (English Berners-Lee Timothy John is a British scientist. Introduced the concept of the World Wide Web in 1991. Since 1994 he has been the head of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Since 1994 he has also been a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and since 2004 a professor at the University of Southampton. Leads the World Wide Web Foundation.

Biography, career

Parents, father Conway Berners-Lee (Conway Berners-Lee) and mother Mary Lee Woods (Mary Lee Woods) were mathematicians-programmers: at the University of Manchester (Manchester University) they worked together to create the Manchester Mark I - the first commercial electronic computer with working memory. As a child, Berners-Lee was fond of drawing on computer punched cards and assembled toy computers from cardboard boxes.

Berners-Lee attended the prestigious Emanuel School from 1969 to 1973. He was fond of design and mathematics, but at the Royal College of Oxford University (Oxford University "s Queen" s College), where he entered in 1973, he decided to study physics. At Oxford, computers became a new passion for Berners-Lee: he independently soldered his first computer based on a Motorola M6800 processor and a simple TV as a monitor. He was also fond of hacking, and after Berners-Lee managed to hack into the university computer, he was forbidden to use it.

After graduating from Oxford University in 1976 with a bachelor's degree in physics with honors, Berners-Lee moved to Dorset and took a job with the Plessey Corporation, where he programmed distributed transaction systems, communication systems, and worked on barcode technology for Plessey Controls. codes. In 1978, he moved to D.G Nash Ltd, where he created software for printers and multitasking systems. In 1980, Berners-Lee worked as a software consultant in Switzerland for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). There, in his spare time, he wrote the Enquire program, which used hypertext to access documents: later its concept formed the basis of the World Wide Web. From 1981 to 1984, Berners-Lee worked for Image Computer Systems Ltd, working on the architecture of real-time systems and graphics and communications software. In 1984, Berners-Lee took up scientific work at CERN: he developed real-time systems for collecting scientific information, as well as computer applications for particle accelerators and other scientific equipment.

In March 1989, Berners-Lee first proposed the idea of ​​the World Wide Web (the term was coined by himself) to the leadership of his CERN division. It was based on the Enquire program: the idea was to exchange scientific information on hypertext web pages using the TCP / IP data transfer protocol. This protocol was used on the US military network ARPANET, the predecessor of the Internet, and on the university network NSFNET until 1988, and by 1989 it began to be used for commercial purposes, in particular for exchanging mail, reading newsgroups and real-time communication. The idea proposed by Berners-Lee was liked by his leader, Mike Sandall, but he did not allocate any large funds and suggested that for the time being, experiment on one NeXT personal computer. On it, Berners-Lee wrote the first ever CERN HTTPd web server and the first web browser and page editor, WorldWideWeb. He also developed the HTTP application layer protocol, the HTML language, and a standardized way to record a website address on the Internet - URL. In 1990, the Belgian Robert Cailliau joined the Berners-Lee project. He secured funding for the project and tackled organizational issues.

Work on the basic standards of the invention was completed in May 1991, and on August 6, 1991, Berners-Lee, in the alt.hypertext newsgroup, first announced the creation of the World Wide Web and gave a link to the first site on the Internet that talked about the technology, and subsequently was conducted directory of other sites. In 1993, through the efforts of Cayo and the consent of CERN, Berners-Lee released the entire concept of the World Wide Web into the public domain, reserving no right to charge for the use of his invention. The creation of browsers for various operating systems, including Mosaic and Netscape for Microsoft Windows, gave impetus to the development of the World Wide Web and an increase in its share in total Internet traffic. It is noteworthy that the Gopher protocol, developed a few years earlier by the University of Minnesota (University of Minnesota), could become a possible alternative to the World Wide Web, but, according to Berners-Lee, Gopher could not compete with WWW due to the fact that, unlike from CERN, the creators of the protocol demanded money for its implementation.

Thus, the creation of the World Wide Web is generally credited to Berners-Lee and, to a lesser extent, Cayo. Sometimes Berners-Lee is mistakenly called the "creator of the Internet", although he was the creator of only one of the elements of the worldwide network, without which, however, the Internet could have remained a network for the military and scientists.

In 1994, Berners-Lee left CERN with the idea of ​​founding a company to develop a new browser, but instead went to work as a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he founded the World Wide Web Consortium (World Wide Web Consortium, W3C), which began to develop and implement technological standards for the World Wide Web. The goal of the organization was declared to be the full disclosure of the potential of the World Wide Web, as well as ensuring its development in the future.

In 2004, Berners-Lee became Professor and Chair of the Computer Science Department at the University of Southampton. Together with MIT and the University of Southampton, he founded and co-directed the Web Science Research Initiative, an organization dedicated to recruiting scientists to explore the potential of the World Wide Web. In the same year, Berners-Lee was awarded the title of Knight of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain, and a year later he was awarded the British Order of Merit. In 2008, Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Foundation, which funds and coordinates spending on the development of the World Wide Web. Berners-Lee himself has repeatedly stated that the Internet is still at the very beginning of its development. He did not stop at creating the basic protocols of the World Wide Web. He called the future of the Internet the "Semantic Web", which will facilitate machine data processing on the network by streamlining the information posted on the Internet: assigning universal resource identifiers (URIs) to all objects and the widespread use of metadata, tags and ontologies (simplistically, metadata dictionaries ), which will greatly simplify the search and work with information.

In 2001, Berners-Lee stated that in a few years the World Wide Web would evolve into the Semantic Web, but the evolution process dragged on, and the concept of the Semantic Web itself was met with criticism: it was noted that the very idea of ​​the Semantic Web was flawed and unrealizable. due to the human factor, experts have been of the opinion that working on it is diverting resources from more important W3C projects. Among the implemented proposals of Berners-Lee, one can note the appearance of websites that became possible not only to read, but also to edit online: Wikipedia and blogs became examples of such sites.

Berners-Lee, in an interview with The Telegraph, said that he did not regret that his invention became popular among pornography distributors and scammers. However, according to him, he would like to change the structure of the World Wide Web so that it does not allow spamming. It is noteworthy that in late 2008, Berners-Lee lost money when he bought a Christmas present in an online store, becoming the victim of online scammers.

Berners-Lee is the author of "Weaving the Web," a book about the history and future of the Web. In 1999, Time magazine named Berners-Lee one of the 100 most important people and 20 most important thinkers of the 20th century. Berners-Lee is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Royal Society of London. In 2004, Berners-Lee became the first recipient of the Finnish Millennium Technology Prize, receiving around 1 million euros as a reward.

Personal life

Berners-Lee has been married twice. His first wife was named Jane (Jane), they met while studying at Oxford University, got married immediately after graduation and initially worked together at Plessey. With his second wife, programmer Nancy Carlson (Nancy Carlson), Berners-Lee met while working at CERN, they got married in 1990 and together they raise two children: daughter Alice (Alice) and son Ben (Ben). As a child, Berners-Lee was baptized in the Church of England, but quickly abandoned that religion. After the invention of the World Wide Web, he became a member of the Unitarian-Universalist Church.

Hobby

Berners-Lee loves to walk in nature, plays the piano and guitar.

Creator of the World Wide Web

British scientist who created the World Wide Web in 1991. Since 1994 he has been the head of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Since 1994 he has also been a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and since 2004 a professor at the University of Southampton. He heads the World Wide Web Foundation, since 2009 he has been an adviser to the UK government. In his opinion, in the future the Internet should evolve into the "Semantic Web".

Timothy "Tim" John Berners-Lee (Timothy "Tim" John Berners-Lee) was born in London on June 8, 1955,. His parents, father Conway Berners-Lee (Conway Berners-Lee) and mother Mary Lee Woods (Mary Lee Woods) were mathematicians-programmers: at the University of Manchester (Manchester University) they worked together to create the Manchester Mark I - the first commercial electronic computer with RAM , , , , . As a child, Berners-Lee enjoyed drawing on computer punched cards and assembling toy computers from cardboard boxes.

Berners-Lee studied at the prestigious Emanuel School from 1969 to 1973. He was fond of design and mathematics, but at the Royal College of Oxford University (Oxford University "s Queen" s College), where he entered in 1973, he decided to study physics, , , , , . At Oxford, computers became a new passion for Berners-Lee: he independently soldered his first computer based on a Motorola M6800 processor and a simple TV as a monitor. He was also fond of hacking and after Berners-Lee managed to hack into the university computer, he was forbidden to use it,,,.

After graduating from the University of Oxford in 1976 with a bachelor's degree in physics with honors, Berners-Lee moved to Dorset and took a job at the Plessey Corporation, where he programmed distributed transaction systems, information communication systems, and also worked on technology in the Plessey Controls division. barcodes, . In 1978, he moved to D.G Nash Ltd, where he created software for printers and multitasking systems. In 1980, Berners-Lee worked as a software consultant in Switzerland for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). There, in his spare time, he wrote the Enquire program, which used hypertext to access documents: later, its concept formed the basis of the World Wide Web,,.

From 1981 to 1984, Berners-Lee worked for Image Computer Systems Ltd, working on the architecture of real-time systems and graphics and communications software. In 1984, Berners-Lee took up scientific work at CERN: he developed real-time systems for collecting scientific information, as well as computer applications for particle accelerators and other scientific equipment,.

In March 1989, Berners-Lee first proposed the idea of ​​the World Wide Web to the leadership of his CERN division ("World Wide Web", this term was coined by himself,). It was based on the Enquire program: the idea was to exchange scientific information on hypertext web pages using the TCP / IP data transfer protocol. This protocol was used on the US military network ARPANET, the predecessor of the Internet, and on the university network NSFNET until 1988, and by 1989 it began to be used for commercial purposes, in particular for exchanging mail, reading newsgroups and real-time communication. The idea proposed by Berners-Lee was liked by his leader, Mike Sandall, but he did not allocate any large funds and suggested that for the time being, experiment on one NeXT personal computer. On it, Berners-Lee wrote the first ever CERN HTTPd web server and the first web browser and page editor, WorldWideWeb. He also developed the HTTP application layer protocol, the HTML language, and a standardized way to record a site address on the Internet - URL , , , , , , , , , , . In 1990, the Belgian Robert Cailliau joined the Berners-Lee project. He secured funding for the project and took up organizational problems,.

Work on the basic standards of the invention was completed in May 1991, and on August 6, 1991, Berners-Lee, in the alt.hypertext newsgroup, first announced the creation of the World Wide Web and gave a link to the first site on the Internet that talked about the technology, and subsequently was conducted directory of other sites , , . In 1993, thanks to the efforts of Kayo and the agreement of CERN, Berners-Lee released the entire concept of the World Wide Web into the public domain, reserving no right to charge for the use of his invention, , , , . The creation of browsers for various operating systems, including Mosaic and Netscape for Microsoft Windows, gave impetus to the development of the World Wide Web and an increase in its share in total Internet traffic,. It is noteworthy that the Gopher protocol, developed a few years earlier by the University of Minnesota (University of Minnesota), could become a possible alternative to the World Wide Web, but, according to Berners-Lee, Gopher could not compete with WWW due to the fact that, unlike from CERN, the creators of the protocol demanded money for its implementation.

Thus, the creation of the World Wide Web is usually credited to Berners-Lee and, to a lesser extent, to Caio, , , . Sometimes Berners-Lee is mistakenly called the "creator of the Internet", although he was the creator of only one of the elements of the worldwide network, without which, however, the Internet could have remained a network for the military and scientists,,,.

In 2004, Berners-Lee became Professor and Chair of the Computer Science Department at the University of Southampton, , . Together with MIT and the University of Southampton, he founded and co-led the Web Science Research Initiative, an organization dedicated to attracting scientific staff to explore the potential for the development of the World Wide Web,. In the same year, Berners-Lee was awarded the title of Knight of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain, and a year later he was awarded the British Order of Merit,,. In 2008, Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Foundation, which funds and coordinates spending on the development of the World Wide Web.

In June 2009, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown appointed Berners-Lee as Cabinet Adviser. In this position, for six months he dealt with the dissemination of open government information,. As a result of this work, in December 2009 it was announced that in early 2010 the data.gov.uk portal will be launched in the UK, where a variety of data will be available in the public domain: from weather reports compiled by the Met Office, the national meteorological service, to statistics on accidents, traffic flows and budget expenditures. According to Berners-Lee, this will stimulate the growth of the British economy by ensuring the transparency of the work of government bodies. Information in a single portal will be submitted not only by the state, but also by local governments,,.

Berners-Lee himself has repeatedly stated that the Internet is still at the very beginning of its development,. He did not stop at creating the basic protocols of the World Wide Web. He called the future of the Internet the "Semantic Web", which will facilitate machine data processing on the network by streamlining the information posted on the Internet: assigning universal resource identifiers (URIs) to all objects and the widespread use of metadata, tags and ontologies (simplistically, metadata dictionaries ), which will greatly simplify the search and work with information , , , , , . In 2001, Berners-Lee stated that in a few years the World Wide Web would evolve into the Semantic Web, however, the evolution process dragged on, and the concept of the Semantic Web itself was met with criticism: it was noted that the very idea of ​​the Semantic Web was flawed and unrealizable due to the human factor, experts expressed the opinion that working on it draws resources away from more important W3C projects, , . Among the implemented proposals of Berners-Lee, one can note the appearance of websites that became possible not only to read, but also to edit online: Wikipedia and blogs, . Berners-Lee, in an interview with The Telegraph, said that he did not regret that his invention became popular among pornography distributors and scammers. However, according to him, he would like to change the structure of the World Wide Web so that it does not allow spamming,. It is noteworthy that in late 2008, Berners-Lee lost money when he bought a Christmas present in an online store, becoming the victim of Internet scams.

In the fall of 2009, Berners-Lee apologized for the fact that the web address standard he created uses two slashes ("slashes" - "//"). According to him, they were completely redundant, and adding them to addresses caused nothing but a waste of time.

Berners-Lee is the author of the book "Weaving the Web", in which he talks about the history of the creation and future of the worldwide web,. In 1999, Time magazine named Berners-Lee one of the 100 most important people and 20 most important thinkers of the 20th century. Berners-Lee is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Royal Society of London. In 2004, Berners-Lee became the first recipient of the Finnish Millennium Technology Prize, receiving about 1 million euros as an award.

Berners-Lee has been married twice. His first wife was named Jane (Jane), they met while studying at Oxford University, got married immediately after graduation and initially worked together at Plessey. With his second wife, programmer Nancy Carlson (Nancy Carlson), Berners-Lee met while working at CERN, they got married in 1990 and together they raise two children: daughter Alice (Alice) and son Ben (Ben) , , . As a child, Berners-Lee was baptized in the Church of England, but quickly abandoned that religion. Already after the invention of the World Wide Web, he became a parishioner of the Unitarian-Universalist Church,,,. Berners-Lee loves to walk in nature, plays the piano and guitar.

Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee OM (Sir Timothy John "Tim" Berners-Lee). Born June 8, 1955. British scientist, inventor of URI, URL, HTTP, HTML, inventor of the World Wide Web (with Robert Cayo) and current head of the World Wide Web Consortium.

After graduating from Oxford University in 1976, Berners-Lee joined Plessey Telecommunications Ltd in Dorset, where he worked for two years, focusing on distributed transaction systems.

In 1978, Berners-Lee moved to D.G Nash Ltd, where he worked on printer software, and created a kind of multitasking operating system.

He then worked for a year and a half at the CERN European Laboratory for Nuclear Research (Geneva, Switzerland) as a software consultant. It was there that he wrote the Enquire program for his own use, which used random associations and laid the conceptual foundation for the World Wide Web.

From 1981 to 1984, Tim Berners-Lee worked for Image Computer Systems Ltd as a systems architect.

In 1984, he received a fellowship from CERN where he worked on the development of distributed systems for collecting scientific data. During this time, he worked on the FASTBUS system and developed his Remote Procedure Call system.

In 1989, while working at CERN on the Enquire internal document exchange system, Berners-Lee proposed the global hypertext project now known as the World Wide Web. The project was approved and implemented.

In 1989, while at CERN, Berners-Lee proposed the project known as the World Wide Web. The project involved the publication of hypertext documents interconnected by hyperlinks, which would facilitate the search and consolidation of information. The Web Project was intended for CERN scientists and was originally used on the CERN intranet. To implement the project, Tim Berners-Lee (together with his assistants) invented URIs (and, as a special case, URLs), the HTTP protocol, and the HTML language. These technologies formed the basis of the modern World Wide Web. Between 1991 and 1993, Berners-Lee improved the technical specifications of the standards and published them.

As part of the project, Berners-Lee wrote the world's first "httpd" web server and the world's first hypertext web browser for the NeXT computer, called "WorldWideWeb" (later "Nexus" to avoid confusion between the name of the technology ("World Wide Web") and browser name). This browser was also a WYSIWYG editor (English WYSIWYG from What You See Is What You Get, “what you see is what you get”), its development was carried out from October to December 1990. The program worked in the NeXTStep environment and began to spread over the Internet in the summer of 1991.

Berners-Lee created the world's first website at http://info.cern.ch (now archived). This site went online on the Internet on August 6, 1991. This site described what the World Wide Web was, how to set up a web server, how to get a browser, and so on. This site was also the world's first Internet directory because Tim Berners-Lee later hosted and maintained a list of links to other sites.

Berners-Lee's major literary work is Weaving the Web: Origins and Future of the World Wide Web, Texere Publishing, 1999, ISBN 0-7528-2090-7 ).

From 1991 to 1993, Tim Berners-Lee continued to work on the World Wide Web. He collected feedback from users and coordinated the work of the Web. Then he first proposed for wide discussion his first URI, HTTP and HTML specifications.

In 1994, Berners-Lee became chair of the 3Com Founders Chair at the MIT Informatics Laboratory and is the chair's lead researcher to this day. After the merger of the Computer Science Laboratory with the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory was formed.

In 1994, he founded the World Wide Web Consortium at the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) at MIT. Since then, and to this day, Tim Berners-Lee leads this consortium. The consortium develops and implements standards for the Internet. The consortium aims to unleash the full potential of the World Wide Web by combining the stability of standards with their rapid evolution.

In December 2004, Tim Berners-Lee became a professor at the University of Southampton. With strong support from the university, he hopes to implement the Semantic Web project.

At the dawn of its existence, the Internet was indeed free, open, not dependent on any company or group. But today, Facebook, Google and Amazon monopolize almost everything that happens on the Web: from the news we read to the sympathy we have for certain public figures, including political ones. We translated a Vanity Fair article about the creator of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, in which he explains why he became disillusioned with his brainchild after large IT corporations learned to spy on Web users and usurped control over them, and how he is trying to decentralize the Internet together again with enthusiastic programmers from all over the world.

“If we want to be sure that the Internet serves humanity, it is worth considering what is its ultimate goal for people.”

Tim Berners-Lee said this to me one morning in Washington, half a mile from the White House. Berners-Lee spoke about the future of the Internet. He talks about it often, enthusiastically and excitedly. With an "Oxford bun" of hair framing his chiseled face, Berners-Lee seems to be the consummate academic - he communicates quickly, with a London accent, stammering, skipping words and sentences from time to time to convey his message. His monologue was a mixture of excitement and traces of melancholy. Nearly three decades ago, Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. This trip to Washington is part of his mission.

By the age of 63, Berners-Lee's career had split into two phases. He first attended Oxford and worked for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and then, in 1989, had an idea that eventually led to the creation of the Internet. Initially, Berners-Lee's innovation was intended to help scientists share data through a then-unknown platform called the Internet, a version of which the US government has been using since the 1960s. But thanks to his decision to release the source code for free, to make the "Internet" an open and democratic platform for everyone, very soon his brainchild began to take on a life of its own. Berners-Lee's life has also changed irrevocably. Times called him one of the most significant figures of the 20th century. He also received the Turing Award (named after the famous codebreaker) for his achievements in computer science, was honored at the Olympic Games, and was also knighted by the Queen. "He's Martin Luther King in our new digital world," said Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation (Berners-Lee is a former member of the foundation's board of trustees).

Berners-Lee also predicted that in the wrong hands his invention would turn into a world destroyer.

Berners-Lee, who never directly benefited from his invention, spent most of his life trying to protect it. While Silicon Valley began to proliferate apps and social media without considering the consequences, Berners-Lee has been thinking about something else for the past three decades. In fact, from the very beginning, he understood how the epic power of the Internet would radically change governments, businesses, and society. He also assumed that his invention, in the wrong hands, could become the destroyer of worlds, as Robert Oppenheimer (the father of the nuclear bomb) once ignominiously remarked about his own creation. His prophecy came true most recently when evidence surfaced that Russian hackers interfered in the 2016 presidential election, or when Facebook admitted it had provided data on more than 80 million users to Cambridge Analytica, a political research firm that worked for Donald Trump's campaign. This episode was the last in an increasingly frightening story. In 2012, Facebook conducted secret psychological experiments on almost 700,000 users. Both Google and Amazon have filed patent applications for devices designed to listen for mood and emotion changes in the human voice.

The nuclear mushroom grew right in front of the person who actually pressed the button. “I was devastated,” Berners-Lee told me that morning in Washington, a few blocks from the White House. For a brief moment, remembering his reaction to recent Internet abuse, Berners-Lee fell silent; he was truly sad. “In fact, physically my mind and body were in different places.” Then, in staccato rhythm passages, he continued to describe his pain from watching his own creation so distorted.

Source: Vanity Fair

However, this unfolding agony had a profound effect on Berners-Lee. Now he's moving into his third act - he's determined to fight back against both his celebrity status and, more importantly, his prowess as a programmer. Specifically, Berners-Lee has been working on a new Solid platform for some time to bring the Internet back to its democratic roots. On this winter day, he came to Washington to attend the annual meeting of the World Wide Web Foundation, which he established in 2009 to protect human rights in the digital environment. For Berners-Lee, this mission is critical to the rapidly approaching future. He estimates that since November 2017, half of the world's population - about 4 billion people - is connected to the Internet and shares everything from resumes to political views and DNA information. As billions more people connect to the Net, they will inject trillions of additional bits of information into the Net, making it more powerful, more valuable, and potentially more dangerous than ever. Berners-Lee noted

"We have shown that the Internet has failed instead of being supposed to serve humanity, and this has happened in many areas."

According to him, the increasing centralization of the Internet "ultimately led to the fact that the platform, without the deliberate actions of its developers, grew into a new large-scale phenomenon that is inherently inhumane."

The idea for the Internet came about in the early 1960s when Berners-Lee was growing up in London. His parents, both pioneers of the computer age, helped build the first commercial stored-program electronic computer. They raised their son on tales of bits, processors, and the power of machines. One of his earliest memories is talking to his father about how computers will one day function like the human brain.

As an Oxford student in the early 1970s, Berners-Lee built his computer using an old television and a soldering iron. He graduated in physics with no specific plans for the future. Subsequently, he worked in various companies as a programmer, but did not stay anywhere for a long time. It was not until the early 1980s, when he received a consultant position at CERN near Geneva, that his life began to change. He was working on a program to help nuclear scientists share data through a new, nascent system. Initially, Berners-Lee gave it the whimsical title "Enquire Within Upon Everything" after the Victorian household reference book of the same name he had read as a child.

It will be nearly a decade before Berners-Lee perfects the technology, renames it, and releases the source code for the Internet. When he first appeared in an academic chat room in August 1991, the significance of this moment was not immediately apparent. “No one was paying much attention,” recalls Vinton Cerf, co-inventor of the Internet and currently the chief Internet evangelist at Google. It was an information system that used the old software known as hypertext to link data and documents over the Internet. At that time there were other information systems. However, what made the Internet a powerful and ultimately dominant system will one day prove to be its most vulnerable side: Berners-Lee gave it away for free; anyone with a computer and an internet connection can not only access it, but also create it. Berners-Lee understood that for the Web to thrive, it needed to be free of patents, fees, royalties, or any other form of control. Thus, millions of innovators have been able to develop their own products to reap the benefits.

And, of course, millions have taken advantage of it. Computer scientists picked it up by creating applications that then attracted others. Within a year of the Internet's launch, budding developers were already finding ways to attract more and more users. The Internet ecosystem has exploded with browsers, blogs and e-commerce sites. In the beginning, it was really open, free, not controlled by any company or group. “We were in the early stages of what the Internet could do,” recalls Brewster Kahle, one of the early pioneers of the Internet, who created the original system for Alexa in 1996, later acquired by Amazon.

"Tim and Vint designed the system in such a way that with a large number of players, no one had an advantage over each other."

Berners-Lee also remembers the quixoticism of that era:

“The spirit of the web has been very decentralized. The man was incredibly powerful. All this was based on the absence of a central authority that you would have to turn to for permission. That sense of individual control, empowerment, that's what we've lost."

Nobody overnight took away and stole the potential of the Internet. Together, by the billions, we have handed it out to every signed user agreement and intimate moment told through this technology. Facebook, Google and Amazon now monopolize almost everything that happens on the Internet: what we buy, the news we read, and who we like. Along with several powerful government agencies, they can control, manipulate and spy in ways that were unimaginable until recently.

Shortly after the 2016 election, Berners-Lee felt something needed to change and began methodically trying to crack his own creation. In the fall of 2017, the World Wide Web Foundation funded a study examining how Facebook's algorithms manage the news and information users receive. Berners-Lee explains:

"For an open web, it's really important to watch how algorithms feed people news, as well as the transparency of those algorithms."

He hopes that by realizing all the dangers, we can collectively refuse the deception imposed by this machine, because half the world's population is on board. “Crossing the border at 50% will be the moment when you need to stop and think,” says Berners-Lee, referring to the upcoming milestone. As billions of people connect to the Internet, it feels more and more necessary to address these issues quickly. He believes this is important not only for those who are already online, but also for the billions of those who have not yet joined. How marginal and weak will they become when the rest of the world leaves them behind?

Although we were talking in a small nondescript conference room, Berners-Lee was ready for action. Speaking of this iconic milestone, he grabbed a notepad and pen and began to write, scribbling lines, dots, and arrows all over the page. He was socially graphing the computing power of the world. “Perhaps this is Elon Musk using his most powerful computer,” Berners-Lee said, drawing a dark line at the top right of the page to illustrate the C.E.O.’s dominance. SpaceX and Tesla. Further down the page, he scribbled another note: "These are people in Ethiopia who have an acceptable connection, but they are completely monitored." The network, which he conceived as a radical tool for democracy, only exacerbated the problems of global inequality.

When about a fifth of the page was covered with lines and dots and scribbles, Berners-Lee stopped. Pointing to the space he left untouched, he said:

“The goal is to fill this square. Fill it out so that all of humanity has full power on the internet."

His expression was resolute and concentrated, as if he was thinking over a problem for which he had not yet found a solution.

“I uploaded a little email code,” Berners-Lee wrote last spring when he posted his code to a chat on Gitter, an open platform often used by programmers to collaborate on ideas. This happened a few days before Mark Zuckerberg was about to testify before Congress. And in this little-known corner of the internet, Berners-Lee worked to challenge that testimony.

The capacity that Berners-Lee launched nearly three decades ago is accelerating—and it's impossible to predict where that will lead.

The idea is simple: re-decentralize the Internet. Working with a small development team, he spends most of his time on the Solid platform, which is designed to give individuals (not corporations) control over their own data.

“People are working in the lab trying to imagine what the Internet could be like. What an online society might look like. What can happen if we give people privacy and control over their data. We are building an entire ecosystem.”

At the moment, Solid technology is still too new and not ready for the masses. But if the plot works, it could radically change the existing power dynamics on the Internet. The purpose of the system is a platform through which users can control access to the data and content they generate on the Internet. Thus, it is the users, and not, say, Facebook or Google, who will be able to choose how this data will be used. Solid code and technologies are open to everyone. Anyone with internet access will be able to enter the chat and start coding. “Every few days, one person shows up. Some of them have heard of the potential of Solid and are looking to turn the world upside down,” he says. As a reward, they get the opportunity to work side by side with an idol. For a programmer, writing code with Berners-Lee is like playing guitar with Keith Richards. But these coders don't just work with the inventor of the Internet because they want to join the cause. These are digital idealists, subversives, revolutionaries and anyone who wants to fight the centralization of the Internet. Working on Solid kind of brings Berners-Lee back to the old days of the Internet:

“The project is under scrutiny, but working on it in some way makes up for the optimism and excitement that fake news robs us of.”

If I knew then how many people would submit a URL,
then I would not use two slashes in the syntax.

Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee(Timothy John "Tim" Berners-Lee) - famous British scientist, inventor of the World Wide Web (WWW, or the World Wide Web), URI, URL, HTTP, HTML, etc. Born in London on June 8, 1955. His parents, Conway Berners- Lee and Mary Lee Woods were both mathematicians and worked on the Manchester Mark I, one of the first computers.

At the age of 12, Tim was sent to the private London school Emanuel (Emanuel School) in the city of Wandsworth. He then continued his studies at King's College, Oxford, graduating with honors in 1976 with a degree in nuclear physics. In this college, Tim had an incident that illustrates his character very well.

One fine day, he was caught playing games at the nuclear physics lab computer and promptly denied access to it (in those days, computers were big and computer time was expensive). But it was precisely this incident that prompted the unlazy young man to design his own personal computer, which he assembled on the “base” of an old TV and a supported M6800 microprocessor. The keyboard was "made" from a broken calculator.

After graduating from Oxford University in 1976 Berners Lee joined Plessey Telecommunications Ltd in Dorset, where he worked on distributed transaction systems. In 1978, he moved to D.G Nash Ltd, where he developed printer software and created a sort of multitasking operating system.

Here he worked for about a year, and then moved to the European Laboratory for Nuclear Research (CERN, CERN), where he got a job as a software development consultant. It was then, for his own needs, that he wrote a small program called Enquire. This program became the progenitor of the World Wide Web, but then Tim did not even know about it.

From 1981 to 1984, Tim Berners-Lee worked for Image Computer Systems Ltd as a systems architect. In 1984 he returned to CERN on a fellowship to develop distributed systems for scientific data collection. During this time, he worked on the FASTBUS system and developed his RPC (Remote Procedure Call) system. The Enquire program has been redesigned.

At a new stage of development, it should not only support arbitrary hypertext links, making it easier to search in the database, but also become a multi-user and platform-independent system. Despite the skepticism of senior colleagues, the World Wide Web project was approved and implemented. It happened in 1989. Tim was greatly assisted in this work by Robert Cailliau, who is sometimes referred to as the "right hand" of the creator of the World Wide Web.

In the fall of 1990, CERN staff received the first "web server" and "web browser" written by Mr. Berners-Lee himself in the NeXTStep environment. In the summer of 1991, the WWW project, which conquered the scientific world of Europe, crossed the ocean and merged into the American one. The appearance of abbreviations well known to us began: , URL, HTTP.

In 1994 Berners Lee moves to the US and becomes chair of the 3Com Founders Chair at the MIT Informatics Lab. He is still the lead researcher there. After the merger of the Computer Science Laboratory with the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the well-known Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) was formed. At the same time, Tim Berners-Lee headed the international consortium W3C, which acts as the Chamber of World Wide Web Standards, which he himself founded at the Informatics Laboratory. The consortium develops and implements standards for the Internet. The W3C aims to unlock the full potential of the World Wide Web by combining the stability of standards with their rapid evolution. In December 2004, Tim Berners-Lee became a professor at the University of Southampton. With strong support from the university, he hopes to implement the Semantic Web project.

Now Sir Tim lives in the suburbs of Boston with his wife Nancy Carlson and two children. He prefers not to share the details of his personal life with anyone.

In recent years, Tim Berners-Lee has been awarded dozens of the most prestigious prizes, but he has not amassed fabulous wealth. Moreover, in a certain sense, it opposes the commercialization of the World Wide Web.

The world's first Berners-Lee website at http://info.cern.ch/, the site is now archived. This site went online on August 6, 1991. This site described what the World Wide Web was, how to set up a web server, how to get a browser, etc. This site was also the world's first Internet directory because Tim Berners-Lee later hosted and maintained a list of links to other sites there. .

Tim Berners-Lee has written several books, the main ones being Weaving the Web: Origins and Future of the World Wide Web and Spinning the Semantic Web: Unlocking the full potential of the World Wide Web. ("Spinning the Semantic Web: Bringing the World Wide Web to Its Full Potential").