Tim Berners-Lee (born June 8, 1955) 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. Berners-Lee is the founder and director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which oversees the continued development of the Web. He is also the founder of the World Wide Web Foundation, and is a senior researcher and holder of the founders chair at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).
Note: In today’s New York Times article, “The Web’s Creator Looks to Reinvent It,” Tim Berners-Lee discussed how the modern web’s corporate control and government surveillance “completely undermines the spirit of helping people create.” On that note, Berners-Lee will give a live-streamed keynote address, “Re-decentralizing the web – some strategic questions,” today at the Decentralized Web Summit at 9:45 a.m. PT. The theme of the summit is “locking the web open.” Happy birthday to Tim.