June 8, 1955 Timothy John Berners-Lee was born on 8 June 1955 in London, by Mary Lee Woods and Conway Berners Lee, both employed by the Ferranti Mark 1. He attended Sheen Mount Primary School and Emanuel School, it is impassioned to electronics; from 1973 to 1976 following the lessons of Queen's College, Oxford, where he graduated in physics. He found a job as an engineer in Poole, at the telecommunications company Plessey, and in 1978 moves in Dorset, D.G. Nash to create programs for printers. Between June and December of 1980 collaborates with Cern, where he proposes a project based on the concept of Hypertext aimed at facilitating the updating and sharing information among researchers: manufactures, therefore, a system prototype called Enquire. After leaving Switzerland, Tim Berners-Lee returns to work in Britain, at John Poole's Image Computer Systems of Bournemouth; works, among other things, on projects that increase its expertise in computer networking. In the mid-1980s, Berners-Lee back at Cern: within a few years the structure becomes the most important Internet node in Europe, thanks to the intuition of the British physicist to combine the network with hypertext. He writes his initial proposal in March of 1989, and a year later, with the help of Robert Cailliau, gives rise to a revised version that is accepted by manager Mike Sendall. Using ideas different from those that characterize the system Enquire, Tim Berners-Lee creates the World Wide Web, running on the NeXTSTEP operating system, and the first Web server, CERN HTTPd (an acronym that stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol daemon). The first website done is put online on 6 August 1991, and is called info.cern.ch: the first web page contains informations about project WWW, so that visitors have the opportunity to learn more about Hypertext and the technical details necessary to create your own web page, as well as an explanation of how to search for information on the net. In 1994, the English researcher becomes one of the six members of the World Wide Web Hall of Fame, and founded the W3C at Mit: it includes various companies involved in creating common standards to improve the quality of the web. Tim Berners-Lee makes their ideas available for free, without licenses and rights; Meanwhile, the World Wide Web Consortium decides to base its standards on a royalty-free technology, so that they can be adopted by anyone. In 1995 he won the prize of Young Innovator of the year awarded by Kilby Foundation, and the Software System Award from Acm, Association for Computing Machinery; two years later, however, is honored with the title of officer of the order of the British Empire for "services to the global interconnection of computers". After being awarded, in 1998, of an honorary doctorate from the University of Essex, the next year is inserted by Time Magazine in its list of 100 most important people of the 20th century. The long string of accolades, however, shows no signs of stopping: in March of 2000 gets an honorary degree from the Open University, and shortly after joined the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. After becoming, in 2001, patron of the East Dorset Heritage Trust, Tim Berners-Lee in 2002 is included in the list of the hundred most important people of the BBC in Britain, and in 2003 won the Royal Photographic Society's Progress Medal and Honorary Fellowship in recognition of "the inventions, researches, publications and contributions that they represented a breakthrough in scientific or technological development of photography and graphic representation". After you received the Computer History Museum's Fellow Award and the Millennium Technology Prize awarded by the President of Finland Tarja Halonen (for a premium of around one million euros), in December 2004 takes the Chair of Computer Science at the University of Southampton School of Electronics and Computer Science, where he worked on the so-called Semantic Web. Become Meanwhile master of Sciences thanks to Lancaster University, in 2005 he was appointed British personality more important than the previous year, for its results and for having "shown British characteristics of diffidence, determination, sharp sense of humour and adaptability". Posted by "The Telegraph" in the list of 100 living geniuses in 2007, receives the Academy of Achievement's Golden Plate Award and the title of Order of Merit, becoming one of the 24 living people who can boast the honor of using the initials O.M. after their name. Awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Manchester in 2008 and by the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid in 2009, in June of the same year starts a collaboration with the British Government to improve accessibility of information on the Internet, participating in the construction of the Power of Information Task Force; together with Nigel Shadbot, is one of the key figures involved in data.gov.uk, Government project that aims to make public most data purchases for official purposes, so as to allow reuse for free. Also in 2009, Berners-Lee launched the World Wide Web Foundation, and was elected a foreign associate of the United States National Academy of Sciences. Also awarded an honorary doctorate from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in 2011 receives award from Mikhail Gorbachev as "man who changed the world", and another honorary doctorate from Harvard University. In 2012, Tim Berners-Lee joined the Internet Hall of Fame, and took part in the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in London.
Article contributed by the team of collaborators.