Historical Figure in Computing

Tim Berners-Lee 

Imagine life as we know it except with no emails, no social media, no online shopping, no instantaneous weather reports etc. Sounds impossible, right? Fortunately we will never have to go through that- all thanks to this guy.

Tim Berners- also known as "TimBL" was born on 8th June 1955 in London, England. 

His inventions include:-

• Hypertext Transfer Protocol
• HTML
• Web Browser
• World Wide Web

The reason why I chose TimBL and find him interesting is because his contribution to the world of Computing is so crucial. The internet can be difficult to use and understand but the World Wide Web has made it so much simpler by supporting sound, videos and other multimedia and also by providing a graphical interface.

If I were given a chance to ask Tim Berners-Lee a question, it would be whether he regrets inventing the World Wide Web, if given a chance would he go back and do it differently by putting more restriction on it? The reason I’d ask this is because the World Wide Web even though beneficial can be abused by cyber bullying, downloading gruesome pictures or looking up instructions to make bombs. At times people blame these issues on the WWW- so I’d really like to hear his take on that.

Another fun question I’d ask him would be how did he come up with the name world wide web and what other names was he considering.

(credit: http://www.csee.umbc.edu)

The goal behind Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web was to develop a ‘hypertext system’ in order to enable data sharing between geographically dispersed teams of researchers in a less time consuming and efficient manner. The World Wide Web was first released in 1990 but only received attention in 1993. Here is a table depicting the growth of the World Wide Web    

Number of websites- Dec 90 to Jan 96
Date	Number of websites
Dec 90	1
Dec 91	10
Dec 92	50
Jun 93	130
Sep 93	204
Dec 93	623
Jun 94	2,738
Dec 94	10,022
Jun 95	23,500
Jan 96	100,000

 (credit: www.pingdom.com)

We can see how fast the web is expanding and how this is only the beginning of much more.

 I'd like to conclude this blog post with my favorite quote by TimBL "The web as I envisaged it, we have not seen it yet. The future is still so much bigger than the past."