His creation of the World Wide Web was the original Internet
start-up. Roisin Woolnough reminisces with Tim Berners-Lee
It is one thing to have a vision and achieve it. It is quite
another to do so without compromising your ideals.
Tim Berners-Lee managed both. The founder of the World Wide Web,
his vision of the Web as it is today first started taking form in
1980. Frustrated by what he saw as the unnecessary incompatibility
of computers, he made it his mission to enable people to share
information through technology. This became a reality in 1991, when
the general public logged onto the Web and became hooked.
Berners-Lee's interest in technology can be traced back to his
childhood. His parents were mathematicians and had a deep interest
in science and technology. Indeed, they have their own place in IT
history, having met while working on the world's first commercial
computer, the Ferranti Mark 1. His mother then acquired the title
of the "first commercial computer programmer", after accompanying
the Ferranti to its installation site.
Berners-Lee, now 45, says his parents were fascinated and
excited by the idea that people could program computers to do
almost anything. This enthusiasm spilt over into family life.
"Around the house, it was clear that maths was exciting and fun,"
says Berners-Lee. "The curious properties of things were a source
of delight and definitely not boring."
When Berners-Lee was still in secondary school, he came home one
day to find his father immersed in books on the brain, trying to
establish how to make computers act intuitively and make the
connections that a person's brain can make. This thought stayed
with Berners-Lee throughout school and university.
After school, Berners-Lee studied physics at Oxford University.
Although he enjoyed the subject and says many of the concepts were
useful to him later on when he was devising his global system, he
felt electronics was a more exciting field at the time. It was at
university that he built his first computer, using a soldering
iron, TTL gates, a M6800 processor and an old television.
The telecom company Plessey Data Systems was doing the milk
round at universities when Berners-Lee was close to graduation. He
liked the look of what the company was offering and so he landed
his first IT job. It wasn't until 1980, when Berners-Lee started a
six-month placement as a software consultant at the European
Particle Physics Laboratory in Switzerland, known as CERN, that his
ideas of a global network began to bear fruition.
In the beginning
It all began with a program that he wrote in his spare time and
for his own use, to help himself remember all the people, computers
and projects he came across at CERN. He called it Enquire, short
for Enquire Within upon Everything, the title of a Victorian book
of advice that his parents had owned. Enquire was a Web-like
program, storing information by using random associations.
Berners-Lee would type in a page of information and each page was a
node in the program. To create a new node, he would simply make a
link from the old node. The computer could then make associations
between different pieces of information, rather like a Web. Enquire
was written in Pascal and ran on the proprietary Norsk Data
Syntran-III operating system. One of the real benefits of Enquire
was that the program stored information without using structures
like matrices or trees.
Much to Berners-Lee's regret, Enquire is no longer in existence.
When his time was up at CERN, he gave the entire Enquire source
code to a systems manager on a floppy disk, and it was subsequently
lost. "I feel very sentimental about that," says Berners-Lee. "It's
a shame when you lose information that exists and it's good to look
back and see which ideas have been there in the first place. I have
developed a paranoia about losing things now and take lots of
photographs and record everything."
Even though Enquire was lost and his work at CERN was at an end,
it had set things in motion for Berners-Lee. It was about this time
that the Internet and hypertext were becoming big news and
Berners-Lee decided that he wanted to marry the two together to
form his worldwide connectivity vision.
Many people find it difficult to separate their concept of the
Internet from their concept of the Web. The Internet is, in basic
terms, a network of networks. It is a series of cables that run
between computers, enabling people to use applications such as
email. The Web is a much more abstract creation, a means for
finding and disseminating information. This time, the connections
are hypertext links. Another misconception is that the Net and the
Web were created at the same time. The Internet was formed in the
1970s, but was only used by a very small community and for specific
functions at first. It only really became something of use and
interest to the general public in 1991, when the Web arrived.
"Before the Web there was the Internet and there were computers
all over the place," explains Berners-Lee. "But they were all
incompatible and you needed different hardware to get at them, and
sometimes different software. There were huge barriers to getting
at information. In fact, you had to be a technological whizz on the
Internet and at using a particular computer and system. If you went
to a library to use a machine, you had to learn the particular
program that that library used."
In 1984, Berners-Lee returned to the CERN on a fellowship
program. His vision was still to generalise computers, but a big
obstacle was convincing people at CERN, and the world at large, of
his ideas. "People were very sceptical and it felt like there were
so many mountains to move," says Berners-Lee. Fortunately, his boss
at CERN game him the freedom to pursue his ideas, even though they
were not strictly within the remit of his job.
Berners-Lee wanted to use the idea of Enquire, but make it into
a global system.
His aim was to combine Enquire's external links with hypertext
and a remote procedure call system he had invented to enable
communication between all the CERN computers and networks.
Then, in 1990, he was given a NeXT computer, the new PC designed
by Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple Computer. The NeXT provided the
platform Berners-Lee needed to program his hypertext ideas. It was
at this point that he decided he needed to give his project a name.
He wanted a name that expressed his vision of a global,
decentralised network. Mine of Information was one idea, but
Berners-Lee thought the acronym MOI, French for me, looked too
egocentric. The Information Mine was another possibility, but that
acronym was even worse - TIM! The World Wide Web, however, summed
up what Berners-Lee was trying to do, and so it was called. It was
on this NeXT computer that Berners-Lee wrote the first Web client,
browser-editor, and server.
Visionaries and a routemaster
Berners-Lee had a lot of support from people who believed in his
vision. Several other IT visionaries were also creating connective
systems. But if the Web had been created by someone else, it is
unlikely that it would exist in the form that it does now. "Someone
would have got at the Web via a different route, but it would have
been taken up by a publisher and it would have been a proprietary
system," explains Berners-Lee. "You would only be published by
going to a mammoth organisation and asking for some space and they
would have agreed a certain consistency. I don't think it would
have taken off so well."
Inventing the Web could have made Berners-Lee a very rich man,
but he refused to patent his inventions. He wanted to keep the Web
open to everyone in a creative format. And by no means are his
Web-labours finished. In 1994, Berners-Lee joined the Laboratory
for Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
He is also the director of the World Wide Web Consortium, a forum
of companies and organisations that is proactive in developing the
Web.
Berners-Lee thinks the Web is soon to enter a new phase. His
vision now is of a semantic Web where machines are able to analyse
the information that is on the Web. Berners-Lee envisages programs
acting as intelligent agents and helping humans to organise their
lives. It goes right back to the early days when he first started
thinking of intuitive computers. "It's so exciting it's got me
writing code again," he says.
Just as the mark-up languages XML and HTML have been so
important in the Web world, so Berners-Lee says new technologies
are emerging with the creation of the semantic Web. For the next
level, the new models will be Resource Description Framework and
Scalable Vector Graphics.
And it won't be long.