Sir Timothy John “Tim” Berners-Lee, also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist, best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. He made a proposal for an information management system in March 1989, and he implemented the first successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and server via the Internet sometime around mid-November of that same year.
On Facing New Challenges | We need diversity of thought in the world to face the new challenges.
On Future Technology | The Web as I envisaged it, we have not seen it yet. The future is still so much bigger than the past.
On The Internet | There was a time when people felt the internet was another world, but now people realise it’s a tool that we use in this world.
On Data | Data is a precious thing and will last longer than the systems themselves.
On Intellectual Property | Intellectual property is an important legal and cultural issue. Society as a whole has complex issues to face here: private ownership vs. open source, and so on.
The Original Idea Of The Web | The original idea of the web was that it should be a collaborative space where you can communicate through sharing information.
On Innovation | Innovation is serendipity, so you don’t know what people will make.
On Machine Translation | I don’t know whether machine translation will eventually get good enough to allow us to browse people’s websites in different languages so you can see how they live in different countries.
On The Mobile Web | The Mobile Web Initiative is important – information must be made seamlessly available on any device.
On Software Engineers | Any good software engineer will tell you that a compiler and an interpreter are interchangeable.
On Being Famous | Celebrity damages private life.
On Google Algorithms | The Google algorithm was a significant development. I’ve had thank-you emails from people whose lives have been saved by information on a medical website or who have found the love of their life on a dating website.
We shouldn’t build a technology to colour, or grey out, what people say.
On The Media | The media in general is balanced, although there are a lot of issues to be addressed that the media rightly pick up on.
On Hackers | A hacker to me is someone creative who does wonderful things.
My Hopes For Internet | I hope we will use the Net to cross barriers and connect cultures.
On Humanity | I’m an optimist about humanity in general, I suppose.
On Explaining The Web | It was really hard explaining the Web before people just got used to it because they didn’t even have words like click and jump and page.
