WORLD WIDE WEB: THE MAN WHO INVENTED INTERNET

Synopsis: Timothy John Berners-Lee was born in London on 8 June 1955 to Conway Berners-Lee and Mary Lee Woods, two mathematicians who had met while programming the Ferranti Mark 1, the first commercially sold computer. Growing up in a household where punched cards and circuit diagrams were part of daily life, Tim developed early passions for model railways and electronics, teaching himself to solder and build control systems in a garden shed in southwest London. These childhood experiments with systems and connections laid the groundwork for a lifetime spent thinking about how information moves from one point to another. >After three years back in England at Image Computer Systems, Tim returned to CERN in 1984 as a fellow. The information chaos had grown worse. The laboratory was building the Large Electron-Positron Collider, generating vast quantities of documentation, and the arrival of the Internet at CERN meant data was flowing in from across the world with no system to organise it. Tim spent years observing the problem, refining an idea that had begun with Enquire. On 12 March 1989, he submitted a proposal titled "Information Management: A Proposal" to his superiors. His boss, Mike Sendall, scribbled "Vague but exciting" across the top and gave him permission to proceed, along with a NeXT computer. >The critical decision came on 30 April 1993, when CERN released the web software into the public domain, renouncing all intellectual property rights. Tim had argued forcefully for this, understanding that a proprietary web would be a dead web. The gates opened. Mosaic, Netscape, and eventually Internet Explorer brought graphical browsing to the masses. Amazon, eBay, Google, and the entire edifice of modern e-commerce were built on protocols that Tim had given away for nothing. This book traces that journey from a post-war London childhood to the creation of the single most consequential information system in human history. It describes the technical craft, the institutional resistance, the quiet persistence, and the moral choice to keep the web open. It also reckons with the fortune that never was. Had Tim Berners-Lee chosen to patent his invention, to charge a license fee per user, per server, or per transaction, he would have become the wealthiest individual in history. Instead, he became a civil servant with a salary, a knight with no castle, and the man who gave away the internet so that everyone else could use it for free.