Posted on 07/17/2004 4:57:23 AM PDT by tjwmason
Tim Berners-Lee, the British inventor of the world wide web, has received his knighthood from the Queen. The "father of the web", who already has an OBE, went to Buckingham Palace to get his reward for "services to the global development of the internet".
In 1991, the knight of the web came up with a system to organise, link and browse pages on the net.
Famously modest, he said he had just been "in the right place at the right time" and did not want his photo taken.
During the hour-long ceremony held in the Ballroom at the Palace, the Queen knighted Sir Tim using the sword that belonged to her father, King George VI.
Free expression
After the ceremony, he played down his achievements, saying: "I suppose it's amazing when you think how many things people get involved in that don't work. "It's very heartening that this one actually did."
Denying his creation had been anything like a "Eureka moment", he said: "I think when you have a lot of jumbled up ideas they come together slowly over a period of several years."
Sir Tim created his hypertext program while he was at the particle physics institute, Cern, in Geneva.
The code he crafted made it far easier for scientists to share their research and information across a fledgling computer network, which became the internet.
In the 1990s, the program was named the "world wide web" and it has given the net as we know it its backbone ever since.
The scientist did not wish to make money from his invention and so did not go on to privatise the program.
Instead, he wanted it to be used to expand the potential of the web as a channel for free expression and collaboration.
Sir Tim currently heads up the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, where he is now based as an academic.
He is now working on an idea called the "semantic web", which is about giving more meaning to what is on the web so that search results become more "intelligent".
It may have given us D.U. and MoveOn (an oxymoron if ever I saw one, perhaps even better an oxymoron supported by morons); but the internet has given us the greatest gift of all F.R. so let's all raise a toast to Sir Tim.
He has. I'm gone. ;)
Al was deeply saddened.
. . .
Sir Tim currently heads up the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, where he is now based as an academic.
Yeah, he didn't want to make money, so he founds W3C (or rather his 'entourage' insisted upon his project), which is seemingly in everything you see, nowdays.
While he gets credit for the protocols, the web really was 'invented' by the inventor of the graphical browser - Mosaic, and then over the Netscape. Ancient history, I know, what with M$, now, dominating and having won those 'browser wars'. But Firefox ain't half bad.
As far as Al Gore - I wonder if he's still on tour with that movie? Or did the studio finally figure Emmerich had cost them enough money? . . . again.
Sir algore?
Well he's knee high to the Nehii!
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