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> November 5, 1999:
Hour Two: Tim Berners-Lee
| Before 1990, the World Wide Web wasn't. HTTP, the hypertext transfer protocol, didn't transfer anything. And there was very little traffic on the "information superhighway."
Then, the Web was invented. Tim Berners-Lee, working at the European physics laboratory CERN, decided to try using the principles of hypertext to connect information found on computers attached to the Internet. Building on ideas he had developed while creating a program to organize information about different programs at CERN, he began to create the beginnings of what we know as the World Wide Web. | 
(image courtesy
Fred Ward, US EPA) | It wasn't an easy birth. Many people didn't immediately understand what was unusual and worthwhile about the Web. And allowing openness to foster innovation and development, while needing the development of common standards to keep the new technology from degenerating into anarchy, forced the early days of the web to tread a very fine line.
On this hour of Science Friday, we'll talk with Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, about how it was developed -- and about where he, as the current director of the World Wide Web Consortium, thinks it might be headed.
Guests:
Tim Berners-Lee
3Com Founders Chair and Principal Research Scientist
Laboratory For Computer Science
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Director, World Wide Web Consortium
Author, "Weaving the Web" (Harper San Francisco, 1999)
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Books/Articles Discussed:
Related Links:
- Tim
Berners-Lee
W3C - The World Wide Web
Consortium
IETF Home Page
NCSA
Mosaic Home Page
Netscape
Welcome
to the Internet Explorer Home Page!
History
of the Internet and WWW: Road 1 -- USA to Europe
Time Magazine: THE
MAN WHO INVENTED THE WEB
This segment produced by:
Charles Bergquist
Web producer:
Charles Bergquist
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