Unlike so many of the inventions that have moved the world, this one was truly the work of one man. Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, but he was not alone - dozens of people in his lab were working on it. William Shockley invented the transistor, but two of his research assistants actually built it. And if there ever was a thing that was made by a committee, it is the Internet. But the World Wide Web is Berners-Lee's creation alone. He threads of the Internet into a worldwide web. With this, he created a mass medium for the 21st century. He gave it to the world. And he has fought to keep it open and free. Everybody knows that with a mouse, a modern and access to the Internet these days you can point and click anywhere on the planet - time and space or long distances are not an obstacle.
It started in the Swiss Alps. The year was 1980. Berners-Lee was a software engineer at the Europeen Laboratory for Practical Physics in Geneva. He was struggling to find a way to organize his notes. He was interested in programs that organized the information in a "brain-like" way: the brain is good at remembering associations. So he deviced a piece of software that connected all the associations in real life. In other words. Berners-Lee designed a kind of hypertext notebook. Words in a file were linked to other files on his computer; he could follow a link and automatically find the related document. It worked splendidly.
The next step was to add information that was on somebody else's computer. He developed an easy-to-learn coding system - HTML, Hypertext Mark-Up Language. He opened up his documents and his computer to everyone and allowed them to link their information to his. The coding system has become the language of communicationa of the Web.
Then Berners-Lee designed an addressing system which gave each Web page a unique location site. And he devised a set of rules that linked these documents together on computers across the Internet.
And on the seventh day, Berners-Lee created WWW's first browser. It allowed users anywhere to view his creation on their computer screens. This brought order and clarity to the chaos that was cyberspace. From that moment on, the Web and the Internet grew as one.
Image: www.rocketball.eu
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