There are people who are deservedly famous, like George W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev. There are people who are famous just for being famous, like Paris Hilton. But even in our celebrity-chasing world, there are even a few people who should be famous, but aren’t.
And the greatest of these is Tim Berners-Lee.
That’s Berners hyphen-Lee. His friends call him TBL
Don’t know who he is?
He’s a soft-spoken, balding Englishman, Fifty years old. He doesn’t care much about money. The last time I checked, he was driving a thirteen-year old Volkswagen.
But if you use the Internet at all, he has dramatically changed your life. No, he didn’t invent the Internet. He invented something that is more important to the vast majority of us.
He invented the World Wide Web. That’s what enables us to use the Internet so easily. Otherwise it would be left to those willing and able to type in reams of computer code for each transaction. That’s not me. And probably not you, either.
Berners-Lee was working at a laboratory in Switzerland back in the far-off year of 1989 when he came up with the idea of hypertext. The idea was to click on certain words that were linked to information stored on a vast number of computers. Not only did he have that idea, he invented a way to make it work. That’s what really made using the Internet possible, even exciting, to the average person. He also named it. Originally, he called it the “mesh.” But he thought that sounded too much like “mess.”
So he decided to call it the World Wide Web. Guess how much money he made from it?
Nothing. Not one cent. Why? Because he gave it away. “I wanted everybody to be able to use it as quickly as possible,” he said. The historian David Starkey said that had TBL charged for using the Web, he “would make Bill Gates look like a pauper today.“
Last year they gave Tim Berners-Lee, who now works at MIT, an award that said he was the Greatest Living Briton. You could argue that the award should have said, Greatest Living Man.
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