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Week 4: Tim Berners-Lee
Timothy John Berners-Lee is a British engineer and computer scientist who is widely credited with inventing the World Wide Web.
In 1989, while working at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, Berners-Lee submitted a proposal to develop a decentralized web of hypertext documents for researchers to share their work with each other.
In 1990, he developed the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) language used by computers to share hypertext documents over the Internet. He also came up with a way to identify documents over the address by giving them a Universal Resource Identifier -- now known as a Uniform Resource Locator, or URL.
In addition, Berners-Lee wrote a client program, or browser, called the "WorldWideWeb" that could retrieve and view these hypertext documents. The pages were formatted using the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) that Berners-Lee had also written.
According to the Wikipedia.com, Berners-Lee "implemented the first successful communication between an HTTP client and server via the Internet" on Christmas Day in 1990.
Quite notably, Berners-Lee made his idea of the World Wide Web available freely, with no patent and no royalties due for use of the technology. He also insists in the axiom Links and Law: Myths that "[t]he ability to refer to a document (or a person or any thing else) is in general a fundamental right of free speech."
In 1994, Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and has since served as its director in overseeing the web's continued development.