At that time, in the 1980s, the Internet existed but data couldn't be shared between individual computers. As Larry Greenemeier explains in his Scientific American article "The Day the Web was Born,", the Internet is "just a set of wires and a protocol for sending information over those wires."
The Web is an application that runs on the Internet. Berner-Lee's innovation was to create software that would allow any computer (or node) to connect to any other computer directly, eliminating the need for a central connection point. Berners-Lee designed and built the first Web browser (WorldWideWeb) and the first Web server (CERN HTTPd). On December 25, 1990, Berners-Lee, with the help of Robert Cailliau and a student at CERN, accomplished the first communication between a Web browser and a server using the Internet.
Greenemeier writes that Berner-Lee's creation involved three basic innovations:
- HTTP (hpertext transfer protocol) This allows you to click on a link and be brought to a document or a web page.
- URIs or URLs (universal resource indicator/locator) This is the address of a web page or document.
- HTML (hypertext markup language) This enables links to be put in documents and pages so they connect.
The first website, built at CERN in 1991, was named Info.cern.ch. It explained the WWW and outlined how one could use a browser and set up a web server.
Berners-Lee's initial philosophy about how the Web should be used has been critical to the evolution of the Web, which in turn has revolutionized global communication. Berners-Lee has always believed that the technology for connectivity should be free and available to everyone around the world. He never patented his software and ideas or collected any royalties for them. His central concept about the Web was that "any person could share information with anyone else, anywhere".
Berners-Lee sees the Web as a public resource. Our businesses, communities and governments are now dependent on it. Moreover, as he writes in his 2010 Scientific American article "Long Live the Web: A Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality," "The Web is more critical to free speech than any other medium...It is vital to democracy."
In this article, Berners-Lee gives a simple analogy to explain the distinction between the Internet and the Web. That is, the Internet is "an electronic network that transmits packets of information among millions of computers" while the Web is like a household appliance that runs on this electronic network. It works as long as it follows standard protocols, just as appliances work on electricity as long as they follow standard protocols, such as operating at 120 volts and 60 hertz in North America.
In 1994 Berners-Lee founded the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) at MIT. This organization is made up of companies that create standards for the Web and recommendations for improving and monitoring the quality of its use.
Berners-Lee's first browser, the WorldWideWeb, was actually both a browser and an editor. It allowed people to create pages and put them up online as well as the ability to edit pages posted by others. Commercial browsers that were developed subsequently didn't include editing capabilities. Berners-Lee originally envisioned the Web's being used not just to view content, but to publish it. It took many years for this to start happening in a widespread way, but it has taken off now with blogs and sites like Wikepedia and Facebook.
Berners-Lee is a professor of engineering at MIT and a professor of electronics and computer science at the University of Southamption in England. He was knighted in 1994. He continues to be active and concerned about the ethics of Web use; issues such as "snooping" on people's personal information via the Web or attempts to restrict Web access by certain governments or corporations.
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