May I introduce Tim Berners-Lee?

Since I devoted a lot of time and effort to my Culture Paper which is about "Great American Entrepreneurs", I decided to introduce to you another great entrepreneur in this blog post. But I don't want you to be bored to hear about Americans all the time, so I am now going to write about a British entrepreneur.

Born and raised in London, Tim Berners-Lee studied physics at the University of Oxford for about three years, but in the end became a computer scientist. Tim is best known for being the inventor of the World Wide Web.
Berners-Lee had been working as a software engineer at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, for several years. In 1989 he came up with the idea of the WWW. Coming from all possible continents, the people working at CERN were gathering in Geneva in order to work on their projects. After returning to their home countries, they wanted to keep in touch and exchange data. Doing so over the telephone or via air mail was both pricey and laboriously. Tim unterstood their problem and thought of an idea how to connect the computers they were working with, even when being a thousand miles away from each other. Thereupon Tim Berners-Lee invented three technologies which are today the basis of the World Wide Web:

1. HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol) is a protocol that defines how information is transmitted and tells, so to say, the web browsers and servers what to do. The acronym "http" or "https" is placed in front of every Internet address (URL).
2. HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is a language used for creating web pages. The language consists of certain elements which are "read" by the web browser (Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, etc.).
3. URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) identifies the name and location of a resource (e.g. a file or a Internet address). A URI would look like this: /images/bernerslee.jpg, whilst a URL, which is similar to the URI, would look like this: http://www.blogger.com/images/bernerslee.jpg.

Based on these three technologies, Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web. The world's very first website, info.cern.ch, was launched in 1991 and outlined the concept of the WWW. If you like to read more about the invention of the World Wide Web, feel free to visit this website. Or you could watch this TED video of Tim Berners-Lee talking about his invention. It's about 16 minutes, but it's definitely worth watching.

Today, Berners-Lee is a professor in the Electronics and Computer Science Department at the University of Southampton (UK). Also, he founded and is currently leading the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an organization working on the development of the WWW. Although Berners-Lee invented today's most dominant communication medium, he is not considered one of the wealthiest persons in the world.

Sources
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/berners_lee_tim.shtml
http://webfoundation.org/about/sir-tim-berners-lee/
http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/H/HTTP.html
http://www.techterms.com/definition/uri
http://www.ted.com/speakers/tim_berners_lee

Image Sources
http://3ehspg3e85cn1oz25ebdof7cd3.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/timbernerslee.jpeg