Biography
Tim Berners-Lee is a british engineer and computer scientist that is credited with inventing the World Wide Web. In 1980 he held a temporary position at CERN (a famous particle physics lab in Geneva) where he began to develop a program called Enquire for his personal use. The program was a way for him to remember connections between people and projects at CERN. After leaving CERN he returned in 1984 and began to develop a simple system where databases could be shared among researchers. He submitted a proposal in 1989 to CERN to develop an information system that would create a decentralized web of information. Two technologies previously developed helped him with developing his system, the Internet and Hypertext. In 1990 he wrote the Hypertext Transfer Protocol. A language computers would use to communicate hypertext documents over the Internet. He also designed document addresses now known as URL. He also wrote the first browser to view hypertext documents and named it the "WorldWideWeb." Along with this he wrote the first web server known as "info.cern.ch." In 1991 he made his browser and web server available over the internet and the WorldWideWeb began to take off. Users of the Web grew as scientists, web enthusiasts, and government agencies all embraced the new medium. With the growth of users on the Web the need for more browsers became neccessary and Berners-Lee among others created browsers for Mac, PC and Unix. By 1993 Berners-Lee's server (info.cern.ch) was getting ten thousand hits a day. He became concerned over the new direction the Web was taking and was worried that the Web would seperate into areas of academic, commercial, free, etc. He was afraid this would destroy the open and free nature of the Web. This led to the first WWW conference in 1994. "A consortium to help the Web develop smoothly." Once CERN dropped out of the consortium Berners-Lee moved to MIT and became the head of the consortium W3C.
*All information for Biography from Internet Pioneers at iBiblio.org and Wikipedia Biography