The Inventor of the World Wide Web and one of the founding fathers of the modern Internet, Tim Berners-Lee is a man who has created a network of information exchange so powerful and widespread in its implementation that his place in history is guaranteed.
To celebrate the 25th year of the Internet, Tim Berners-Lee discusses how his interest in physics and electronics stemmed from his guidance and support from his enthusiastic parents and teachers as well as his own curiosity of computer technology and his vision to see problem solving as a collaborative enterprise using a tool which would not only link people together in conversation but link the ideas and experiences from individuals anywhere on the planet creating a global community.
The first Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) was performed by Lee in C code on a NEXT terminal using a Cisco Systems IP router which is still at CERN today.
The first internet protocol, IP, was invented by computer engineers Robert Elliot "Bob" Kahn and Vint Cerf.
IP works by exchanging pieces of information called packets. A packet is a sequence of octets (bytes) and consists of a header followed by a body. The header describes the packet's source, destination and control information. The body contains the data IP is transmitting.
Due to network congestion, traffic load balancing, or other unpredictable network behavior, IP packets can be lost, duplicated, or delivered out of order.
To combat this, Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf also invented the Transmission Control Program TCP, the internetworking protocol for sharing resources using packet-switching among hosts on a computer network.
TCP detects the disordered packet data, requests re-transmission of lost data, rearranges out-of-order data, and even helps minimize network congestion to reduce the occurrence of the other problems. Once the TCP receiver has reassembled the sequence of octets originally transmitted, it passes them to the receiving application. Thus, TCP abstracts the application's communication from the underlying networking details.
Bob Kahn unveiled the first use of IP packet-switching technology on 20 connected computers in the form of Arpanet in the 1970's while working for DARPA to much appraisal from the Pentagon who funded Kahn to create the United States government's billion dollar Strategic Computing Initiative.
Today, IP/TCP is utilized extensively by many of the Internet's most popular applications, including the World Wide Web (WWW) developed by Tim Berners-Lee using the HTTP which is an application layer of the TCP.
The attractiveness in sharing information with such a user-friendly interface, allowed the web to grow from a "Vague, But Exciting" idea into a global phenomenon which has connected humanity as never before.
Tim Berner's Lee talks about how the internet was adopted with business entrepreneurs with the real spark of innovation in their eye, in order to create the very first internet service providers in the early 1990's to bring connectivity to the population of the world. This has changed the face of business and trade and has created entire industries, in the form of media, social networking and information distribution.
Moreover, the licence-free nature of the internet has allowed users to create a culture of expression and learning online, with science journals and information to solve problems being evermore available as new information is individually added.
Nevertheless, the freedom of information online is constantly under attack in the form of censorship, either from governments or corporations which strangles the flow of knowledge using the power of the internet.
Tim Berners-Lee, like many others, stresses that we are only seeing the tip of the iceberg with computer and information technology and that we have much more progress to make. In order to do this, the same information must be in the public domain that allowed Tim Berners-Lee to make the web in the first place if we are to continue to make new technological breakthroughs.
Freedom of speech and expression must be protected online as a priory. Democracy should not be a thing we only admire from afar, we should begin to treat it as the key to our very survival as we move into a more complex and advanced world which needs every member of the human species to be connected and informed.
