10 Fascinating Facts About the Internet and the Guy Who Invented It

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Sir Tim Berners-Lee, gestures as he introduced to the audience during the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games on July 27, 2012 at the Olympic stadium in London. (Photo credit should read FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP/Getty Images)

Timothy John Berners-Lee was born during the summer of June 8th, 1995 in London, England. He is one of four children born to Conway Berners-Lee and Mary Lee Woods. He attended secondary school at Emanuel School from 1969 to 1973. He then attended college at The Queen’s College, Oxford from 1973 to 1976. He pursued a B.A degree in physics and earned first-class honors.

Upon graduating, Tim Berners-Lee worked as an engineer for two years at Plessey Telecommunications Ltd, a telecommunications company in Dorset, England. Afterward, in 1978, he joined D.G Nash Ltd writing type-setting programs to be used in intelligent printers and multi-tasking operating systems. In 1980, he became an independent software engineer consultant for CERN: information sharing turned out to be a significant part of his responsibility. Motivated to find a more straightforward, more convenient way to accomplish this task, he wrote a program to store information called Enquire. Moreover, so, what started as a workaround to a problem became the bedrock of online information sharing, which later on attributed to the inception of the World Wide Web.

1. There is a Difference Between World Wide Web and Internet

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(Photo credit LIONEL BONAVENTURE/AFP/Getty Images)

You may be tempted to think they are the same thing because honestly, sometimes we use these words synonymously, which is not true, but they are however akin to one another. Firstly, the Internet is a superset of networks. Put simply; it is a vast network made up of other networks. However, though there was an interconnection of computers, accessing information was a different matter. Hence, the World Wide Web, which made it easier to access and retrieve information on the network. Tim Berners-Lee developed a standard for encoding documents (HTML, Hypertext Markup Language), connecting them (HTTP, Hypertext Transfer Protocol), and addressing them (URL, Uniform Resource Locator). Through this, standard information was shared and best of all, it was and still is free.

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