"The world can only be changed one piece at a time. The art is picking that piece."
Tim Berners-Lee
Tim Berners-Lee (b. 1955) knows a lot about changing the world. There was a time when his web pages were the only pages on the World Wide Web.
Born to parents who had met while developing one of the earliest computers, Berners-Lee studied for a physics degree from Queen's College, Oxford, then headed straight for the computer industry. By 1989 he was working in Geneva, Switzerland, at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory. CERN was interested in finding 'a way by which groups of researchers could share information more easily. Berners-Lee saw the'- potential for marrying hypertext—a technique for linking documents together using clickable words—with the Internet, which was already heavily used by CERN. Working with colleague Robert Cailliau, he proposed a system he called the World Wide Web.
The first web server was up and running by the end of 1990. At the time, Berners-Lee's "NeXT" computer did not have a color display, and the earliest web pages were simple black-and-white text. Now, less than twenty years later, there are more than a hundred million websites on the World Wide Web. The Web certainly continues to help people in their physics research, but it also helps them to do their shopping, listen to music, read their morning newspapers, and get back in touch with old friends.
Berners-Lee, who without doubt picked the right piece of the world to change, is now Sir Timothy Berners-Lee, Director of the World Wide Web Consortium, Senior Researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton. The significance of his work in shaping the early twenty-first century is beyond calculation.
