Tim Berners Lee: inventor of the World Wide Web

A great Briton?

Charles Babbage, Alan Turing and Tim Berners Lee have all been shortlisted by a nationwide survey, conducted by the BBC, to find the greatest ever Briton. Over 30,000 people took part in the poll, and the overall winner will be chosen by the public in a further vote later this year.

Tim Berners Lee: inventor of the World Wide Web
>Tim Berners Lee, who invented the World Wide Web in 1989 while working for CERN - the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland - has been credited as one of the most influential people of the 20th century.

Berners Lee in 1980 first wrote a program, Enquire, that allowed him to link together related documents stored on his computer. These hypertext links allowed him to organise his work by "remembering" the association between two documents.

The next stage was to link to documents stored on other computers. To make this possible, in 1990 Berners Lee started work on creating the first World Wide Web server - "httpd", the first web browser, the URL addressing system and HTML, the language used to code web pages. By the summer of 1991 Berners Lee's browser, called "WorldWideWeb" was available on the internet.

Berners Lee's work was recognised last year when he was made a fellow of the Royal Society, the prestigious British scientific body.

Graeme Wearden writes for ZDNet.co.uk