Tim Berners-Lee grew up in London. Both of his parents (Mary Lee Woods and Conway Berners-Lee) were mathematicians, who had worked on the Ferranti Mark 1, a pioneering effort to commercialize the early Manchester computer. He inherited their interests, playing with electronics as a boy, but choosing physics for his university studies. After earning a degree from Queen’s College, Oxford in 1976 he worked on programming problems at several companies, before joining the European physics lab CERN in 1984. His initial job was in the data acquisition and control group, working to capture and process experimental data.

Inventing the Web

CERN’s business was particle smashing, not computer science, but its computing needs were formidable and it employed a large technical staff. Its massive internal network was connected to the Internet. In March 1989 Berners-Lee began to circulate a document headed “Information Management: A Proposal,” which proposed an Internet-based hypertext publishing system. This, he argued, would help CERN manage the huge collections of documents, code, and reports produced by its thousands of workers, many of them temporary visitors.

Berners-Lee later said that he had been dreaming of a networked hypertext system since a short spell consulting at CERN in 1980. Ted Nelson, who coined the phrase “hypertext” back in the 1960s, had imagined an online platform to replace conventional publishers. Authors could create links between documents, and readers would follow them from one document to another. By the late-1980s hypertext was flourishing as a research area, but in practice was used only in closed systems, such as the Microsoft Windows help system and the Macintosh Hypercard electronic document platform.

Mike Sendall, Berners-Lee’s manager, wrote “vague but exciting” on his copy of the proposal. In May 1990, he authorized Berners-Lee to spend some time on his idea, justifying this as a test of the widely hyped NeXT workstation. This was a high-end personal computer with a novel Unix-based operating system that optimized the rapid implementation of graphical applications. Berners-Lee spent the first few months working out specifications attempting to interest existing hypertext software companies in his ideas. By October 1990, he had begun to code prototype Web browser and server software, finishing in December. On 6, August, 1991, after tests and further development inside CERN, he used the Internet to announce the new “World Wide Web” and to distribute the new software.

Elements of the Web

The World Wide Web was ambitious in some ways, as its name reflects, but cautious in others. Berners-Lee’s initial support from CERN did not consist of much more than a temporary release from his other duties. So he leveraged existing technologies and standards everywhere in the design of the WWW. He remembers CERN as “chronically short of manpower for the huge challenges it had taken on.” There was no team of staff coders standing by to implement any grand plans he might come up with.

The Web, like most of the Internet during this era, was intimately tied in with the Unix operating system (for which Dennis M. Ritchie and Ken Thompson won the 1983 Turing Award). For example, the first Web server (and most since) have run as background processes on Unix-derived operating systems. URLs use Unix conventions to specify file paths within a website. To develop his prototype software, Berners-Lee used the NeXT workstation. More fundamentally, Berners-Lee’s whole approach reflected the distinctive Unix philosophy of building new system capabilities by recombining existing tools.

The Web also followed the Internet philosophy of achieving compatibility through communications protocols rather than standard code, hardware, or operating systems. His specifications for the new system led to three new Internet standards.

Web pages displayed text. HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) specified the way text for a Web page should be tagged, for example as a hyperlink, ordinary paragraph, or level 2 heading. It was an application of the existing SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) markup language definition standard.

HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol) specified the interactions through which Web browsers could request and receive HTML pages from Web servers. HTML was, in computer science terms, stateless – users did not log into websites and each request for a Web page or other file was treated separately. This made it a file transfer protocol, which was easy to design and implement because existing Internet standards and software, most importantly TCP/IP (for which Vinton Cerf and Robert E. Kahn won the 2004 Turing award), provided the infrastructure needed to pipe data across the network from one program to another. Berners-Lee later called this use of Internet protocols “politically incorrect” as European officials at the time were supporting a transition to the rival ISO network protocols. A few years later it was the success of the Web that put the final nail in their coffin.

Consider a Web address like http://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/berners-lee_8087960.cfm. This is a URL or Uniform Resource Locator (Berners-Lee originally called this a Universal Resource Identifier). The “amturing.acm.org” part identified the computer where the resource was found. This was nothing new – Internet sites had been using this Domain Name System since the mid-1980s. The novelty was the “http://” which told Web browsers, and users, to expect a Web server. Information after the first single “/” identified which page on the host computer was being requested. Berners-Lee also specified URL formats for existing Internet resources, including file servers, gopher servers (an earlier kind of Internet hypertext system), and telnet hosts for terminal connections. In 1994, Berners-Lee wrote that “The fact that it is easy to address an object anywhere in the Internet is essential for the system to scale, and for the information space to be independent of the network and server topology.”

The URL was the simplest of the three inventions, but was crucial to the early spread of the Web because it solved the “chicken and egg” problem facing any new communications system. Why set up a Web page when almost nobody has a Web browser? Why run a Web browser when almost nobody has set up a Web server to visit? The URL system made Web browsers a convenient way to access existing resources, cataloged on Web pages. In 1992, the Whole Internet Catalog and User’s Guide stated that “the World Wide Web hasn’t really been exploited yet… Hypertext is used primarily as a way of organizing resources that already exist.”

The Web Takes Off

CERN found some resources to support the further development of the Web – about 20 person years of work in total, mostly from interns. More importantly, it made it clear that others were free to use the new standards and prototype code to develop new and better software. Robert Cailliau, of the Office Computing Systems group, played an important role as a champion of the project within CERN. In 1991 CERN produced a simple text-based browser that could easily be accessed over the Internet and a Macintosh browser, essential to the initial spread of the Web as NeXT workstations remained very rare.

Over the next few years others implemented faster and more robust browsers with new features such as graphics in pages, browser history, and forward and back buttons. Mosaic, released in 1993 by the National Center for Supercomputer Applications of the University of Illinois, brought the Web to millions of users. In April, 1994 CERN, which was still trying to maintain a comprehensive list of Web servers, cataloged 829 in its “Geographical Registry.”

Berners-Lee later attributed his success largely to “being in the right place at the right time.” He succeeded where larger and better funded teams had failed, setting the foundation for a global hypertext system that quickly became a universal infrastructure for online communication and the foundation for many new industries. Yet the ACM’s 1991 Hypertext conference had rejected Berners-Lee’s paper describing the World Wide Web. From a research viewpoint, the Web seemed to sidestep many thorny research problems related to capabilities that Ted Nelson thought essential for a public hypertext publication system. If a Web page was moved, then links pointing to it stopped working. If the target page was changed, then it might no longer hold the content the link promised. Links went only one way – one couldn’t see which other pages linked to a document. There was no central, searchable index of websites and their content. Neither did the Web itself provide any way for publishers to get paid when people read their work.

Berners-Lee had only a few months at his disposal, which may have been a hidden blessing: Nelson worked for decades without coming close to finishing his system. Rather than attack intractable problems, Berners-Lee used proven technologies as the building blocks of a system intended to be powerful and immediately useful rather than perfect.

The Web’s reliance on existing technologies was appealing to early users and eased deployment – setting up a Web server on a computer already connected to the Internet just involved downloading and installing a small program. This technological minimalism made the Web easy to scale, with no indexing system or central database to overload. After the Web took off, whole new industries emerged to fill in some of the missing capabilities needed for large scale and commercial use, eventually leading, for example, to the rise of Google as the dominant provider of Internet search.

One crucial feature that Berners-Lee built into his prototype Web software was left out of its successors. His browser allowed users to edit pages, and save the changes back on the server. His 1994 article in Communications of the ACM noted that “The Web does not yet meet its design goal of being a pool of knowledge that is as easy to update as to read.” Editing capabilities were eventually added in other ways – first through separate HTML editing software, and later with the widespread adoption of content management systems where the software used to edit Web pages is itself accessed through a Web browser.

A screenshot of Berners-Lee’s Web browser software running on his NeXT computer. Note the Edit menu to allow changes, and the Style menu which put decisions over fonts and other display details in the hands of the reader rather than Webpage creators. Since 2014 this computer has been exhibited at the Science Museum in London.

Berners-Lee feels that his original design decisions have held up well, with one exception: the “//” in URLs which make addresses longer and harder to type without adding any additional information. “I have to say that now I regret that the syntax is so clumsy” he wrote in 2009.[1]

Standardizing the Web

Mosaic’s successor, the commercial browser Netscape, was used by hundreds of millions and kickstarted the “.com” frenzy for new Internet stocks. By 2000 there were an estimated 17 million websites online, used for commercial transactions such as online shopping and banking as well as document display. In the process, HTML was quickly given many clunky and incompatible extensions so that Web pages could be coded for things like font styles and page layout rather than its original focus on document structure.

In 1994 Berners-Lee left CERN for a faculty job at MIT. This let him establish the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), to standardize HTML and other, newer, elements of the Web. Berners-Lee had been frustrated in 1992 in an initial attempt to work with the Internet Engineering Task Force, the group that developed and standardized other Internet protocols. The consortium followed a different model, using corporate memberships to support the work of paid staff members. With its guidance the Web has remained open during its growth, so that users can choose their preferred Web browser while still accessing the full range of functionality found on modern websites. It also played a crucial role in adoption of the XML data description language. As of 2017, his primary appointment remains at MIT where he holds the Founders Chair in the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and continues to direct W3C.

The Semantic Web

Since the late 1990s Berners-Lee’s primary focus has been on trying to get Web publishers and technology companies to add a set of capabilities he called the “Semantic Web.” Berners-Lee defined his idea as follows: “The Semantic Web is an extension of the current Web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation."

Document metadata was largely left off the original Web, in contrast to traditional online publishing systems, which made it hard for search engines to determine basic information such as the date on which an article was written or the person who wrote it. The Semantic Web initiative covered a hierarchy of technologies and standards that would let the creators of Web pages tag them to make their conceptual structure explicit, not just for information retrieval but also for machine reasoning.

Legacy and Recognition

The success of the Web drove a massive expansion in Internet access and infrastructure – indeed most Internet users of the late-1990s experienced the Internet primarily through the Web and did not clearly separate the two. Berners-Lee has been widely honored for this work, winning a remarkable array of international prizes. Sir Tim, as he been known since the Queen knighted him in 2004, has been recognized as one of the public faces of British science and technology. In 2012 he appeared with a NeXT computer during the elaborate opening ceremony of the London Olympic Games.

He has been increasingly willing to use this public influence to impact the ways in which governments and companies are shaping the Web. In 2009 he set up the World Wide Web Foundation, which lobbies for “digital equality” and produces rankings of Web freedom around the world. More recently, Berners-Lee has championed protection for personal data, criticized the increasing dominance of proprietary social media platforms, and bemoaned the prevalence of fake news online.

Author: Thomas Haigh

https://www.w3.org/People/ Berners-Lee/FAQ.html#etc</s>The Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) has announced its 2016 ACM A.M. Turing Award is being awarded to Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Berners-Lee, a professor at MIT and the University of Oxford, is widely known for creating the World Wide Web, first web browser, and the protocols and algorithms that brought the web to scale.

Today, the web is used by billions of people worldwide to communicate, access information, buy and sell goods and services, as well as participate in a number of different activities.

RELATED CONTENT: Sir Tim Berners-Lee finds three challenges the web needs to overcome

“It is an honor to receive the Turing Award and to be included in such extraordinary company with the other winners. I’m also humbled to be connected to Alan Turing. My parents, who worked on the Manchester/Ferranti Mark I, knew Turing when they were at Manchester. He changed everything: By pointing out that computers are all equivalent, he threw down the gauntlet to all who programmed them, what was possible with computers is limited only by our imaginations,” Berners-Lee said in a

Berners-Lee submitted his proposal for the World Wide Web in 1989 and launched the first website in 1991. Since then, he founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in 1994, and established the World Wide Web Foundation in 2009.

“The first-ever World Wide Web site went online in 1991,” said Vicki L. Hanson, president of ACM. “Although this doesn’t seem that long ago, it is hard to imagine the world before Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s invention. In many ways, the colossal impact of the World Wide Web is obvious. Many people, however, may not fully appreciate the underlying technical contributions that make the Web possible. Sir Tim Berners-Lee not only developed the key components, such as URIs and web browsers that allow us to use the Web, but offered a coherent vision of how each of these elements would work together as part of an integrated whole.”

Other inventions Berners-Lee is known for include: Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and Hypertext Markup Language (HTML).

“The Web has had an immense impact on the world; transforming every part of society: how we communicate, how we learn, how we acquire information, and how we engage in commerce. Tim’s soaring vision of what was possible in the world is anchored on breakthrough contributions to computing – which is what is recognized by the Turing Award. It is a great honor to work with Tim and to see his continuing leadership in technology, society, and commitment to the openness of the Web,” said

The ACM Turing Award is often referred to as the “Nobel Prize of Computing” and comes with a $1 million prize.</s>Sir Tim Berners-Lee Designed Integrated Architecture and Technologies that Underpin the Web

NEW YORK, NY--(Marketwired - April 04, 2017) - ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery (www.acm.org), today named Sir Tim Berners-Lee, a Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Oxford, as the recipient of the 2016 ACM A.M. Turing Award. Berners-Lee was cited for inventing the World Wide Web, the first web browser, and the fundamental protocols and algorithms allowing the Web to scale. Considered one of the most influential computing innovations in history, the World Wide Web is the primary tool used by billions of people every day to communicate, access information, engage in commerce, and perform many other important activities.

The ACM Turing Award, often referred to as the "Nobel Prize of Computing," carries a $1 million prize, with financial support provided by Google, Inc. It is named for Alan M. Turing, the British mathematician who articulated the mathematical foundation and limits of computing. ACM is marking "50 Years of the Turing Award" with special events this year. This celebration will culminate June 23-24, 2017 in San Francisco, CA with an ACM conference on the future of computing featuring 20 Turing laureates and other distinguished members of the computing field. The conference will be followed by the ACM Awards Banquet on Saturday evening, June 24, 2017, at which Berners-Lee will formally receive the 2016 ACM A.M. Turing Award.

"The first-ever World Wide Web site went online in 1991," said ACM President Vicki L. Hanson. "Although this doesn't seem that long ago, it is hard to imagine the world before Sir Tim Berners-Lee's invention. In many ways, the colossal impact of the World Wide Web is obvious. Many people, however, may not fully appreciate the underlying technical contributions that make the Web possible. Sir Tim Berners-Lee not only developed the key components, such as URIs and web browsers that allow us to use the Web, but offered a coherent vision of how each of these elements would work together as part of an integrated whole."

"The Web has radically changed the way we share information and is a key factor for global economic growth and opportunity," said Andrei Broder, Google Distinguished Scientist. "The idea of a web of knowledge originated in a brilliant 1945 essay by Vannevar Bush. Over the next decades, several pieces of the puzzle came together: hypertext, the Internet, personal computing. But the explosive growth of the Web started when Tim Berners-Lee proposed a unified user interface to all types of information supported by a new transport protocol. This was a significant inflection point, setting the stage for everyone in the world, from high schoolers to corporations, to build their Web presences and collectively create the wonderful World Wide Web."

Berners-Lee, who graduated from Oxford University with a degree in Physics, submitted the proposal for the World Wide Web in 1989 while working at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. He noticed that scientists were having difficulty sharing information about particle accelerators. In 1989, interconnectivity among computers via Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) had been in existence for a decade, and while segments of the scientific community were using the Internet, the kinds of information they could easily share was limited. Berners-Lee envisioned a system where CERN staff could exchange documents over the Internet using readable text that contained embedded hyperlinks.

To make his proposed information-sharing system work, Berners-Lee invented several integrated tools that would underpin the World Wide Web, including:
• Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) that would serve to allow any object (such as a document or image) on the Internet to be named, and thus identified.
• Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) that allows for the exchange, retrieval, or transfer of an object over the Internet.
• Web browser, a software application that retrieves and renders resources on the World Wide Web along with clickable links to other resources, and, in the original version, allowed users to modify webpages and make new links.
• Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) that allows web browsers to retrieve documents or other resources and render them as multimedia webpages.

Berners-Lee launched the world's first website, http://info.cern.ch, on August 6, 1991.

Central to the universal adoption of the World Wide Web was Berners-Lee's decision to develop it as open and royalty-free software. Berners-Lee released his libwww software package in the early 1990s, granting the rights to anyone to study, change, or distribute the software in any way they chose. He then continued to guide the project and worked with developers around the world to develop web-server code. The popularity of the open source software, in turn, led to the evolution of early web browsers, including Mosaic, that are credited with propagating the Web beyond academic and government research settings and making it a global phenomenon.

By 1994, the number of websites had grown to nearly 3,000, and today, there are more than 1 billion websites online.

Berners-Lee is a graduate of Oxford University, where he received a first-class Bachelor of Arts degree in Physics. Berners-Lee is the 3Com Founders Professor of Engineering in the School of Engineering with a joint appointment in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he also heads the Decentralized Information Group (DIG). He is also a Fellow at Christ Church and a Professorial Research Fellow at the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford.

Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in 1994, where he continues to serve as Director. W3C is an international community that develops open standards to ensure the interoperability and long-term growth of the Web. In 2009, he established the Word Wide Web Foundation, which works to advance the Open Web as a public good and a basic human right. He is the President of the Open Data Institute (ODI) in London.

He has received many awards and honors, including the ACM Software System Award in 1995. Berners-Lee was knighted in 2004 and received the Order of Merit in 2007, becoming one of only 24 living members entitled to hold the honor. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, and has received honorary degrees from a number of universities around the world, including Manchester, Harvard, and Yale. TIME magazine included him as one of the 100 Most Important People of the 20th Century.

About the ACM A.M. Turing Award

The A.M. Turing Award http://amturing.acm.org/ was named for Alan M. Turing, the British mathematician who articulated the mathematical foundation and limits of computing, and who was a key contributor to the Allied cryptanalysis of the Enigma cipher during World War II. Since its inception in 1966, the Turing Award has honored the computer scientists and engineers who created the systems and underlying theoretical foundations that have propelled the information technology industry.

About ACM

ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery www.acm.org, is the world's largest educational and scientific computing society, uniting computing educators, researchers and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources and address the field's challenges. ACM strengthens the computing profession's collective voice through strong leadership, promotion of the highest standards, and recognition of technical excellence. ACM supports the professional growth of its members by providing opportunities for life-long learning, career development, and professional networking.</s>Tim Berners-Lee, the man credited with inventing the world wide web, has been honored with the 2016 Turing Award.

The award, which is often referred to as the Nobel Prize for the computing industry, is present annually by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) to an individual who made “major contributions of lasting importance to computing.” It is named in honor of British mathematician and scientist Alan Turing and backed by a $1 million prize courtesy of Google.

Britain-born Berners-Lee, who was honored with a knighthood in 2003, pioneered the web in 1989 while working at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, as a way to allow scientists across the world to share information. His credits include the creation of a naming scheme (URIs), a communications protocol (HTTP) and a language for webpages (HTML). In addition, he coded the first browser using open-source — that helped develop early browsers like Mosaic which popularized the web beyond the world of academia.

“The first-ever World Wide Web site went online in 1991. Although this doesn’t seem that long ago, it is hard to imagine the world before Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s invention,” ACM President Vicki L. Hanson said in a statement.

“In many ways, the colossal impact of the World Wide Web is obvious. Many people, however, may not fully appreciate the underlying technical contributions that make the Web possible. Sir Tim Berners-Lee not only developed the key components, such as URIs and web browsers that allow us to use the Web, but offered a coherent vision of how each of these elements would work together as part of an integrated whole,” Hanson added.

The award will presented to Berners-Lee, who is founder of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the World Wide Web Foundation, at the ACM’s annual banquet in San Francisco on June 24.

“I’m humbled to receive the namesake award of a computing pioneer who showed that what a programmer could do with a computer is limited only by the programmer themselves,” Berners-Lee told MIT, where he is a senior researcher and holder of the founders chair at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).

Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, known as ‘Fathers of the Internet’ for their creation of the TCP/IP protocol, are among previous recipients of the Turing Award, which was first awarded in 1966.

Despite the scale of the web today doing undoubted good in the world, Berners-Lee has his concerns for the future. In an interview with the BBC, he was critical of UK government’s push to weaken encryption to battle terrorism, U.S. legislation that could allow ISPs to sell user browser histories, and the FCC Chairman’s pledge to roll back net neutrality regulations.</s>Sir Tim Berners Lee, deservingly among the most decorated of technology professionals for his invention of the world wide web, has now been honored with the 50th edition of the ACM A.M. Turing Award (a.k.a., the Nobel Prize of Computing).

The MIT and University of Oxford professor is being recognized with the $1M Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) prize, funded by Google, for inventing the web, coming up with the first browser and working on the protocols and algorithms that have allowed the web to scale.

“The first-ever World Wide Web site went online in 1991,” said ACM President Vicki L. Hanson, in a statement. “Although this doesn’t seem that long ago, it is hard to imagine the world before Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s invention. In many ways, the colossal impact of the World Wide Web is obvious. Many people, however, may not fully appreciate the underlying technical contributions that make the Web possible. Sir Tim Berners-Lee not only developed the key components, such as URIs and web browsers that allow us to use the Web, but offered a coherent vision of how each of these elements would work together as part of an integrated whole.”

Berners-Lee, who serves as director of the World Wide Web Consortium that he established in 1994, continues to fight the good fight for his invention some 28 years after its birth, too, recently citing three big concerns that threaten the web's potential to serve humanity to its fullest.

Berners-Lee's accomplishments have been recognized many times over the years. Among his accolades: 2012 Internet Hall of Fame induction; 2002 Japan Prize; 2006 President's Medal, 2002 Marconi Prize, 2004 Millennium Technology Prize.

Last year's Turing Award went to the crypto dream team of Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman.

The ACM has announced it will celebrate 50 years of the A.M. Turing Award with a (tech) star-studded conference in San Francisco this summer. The two-day event, to be held June 23-24, will "explore how computing has evolved and where the field is headed," according to the ACM.</s>Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web less than three decades ago, has won the top computing industry prize just as his wildly successful invention is challenged by new mobile technology.

The Association of Computing Machine granted Berners-Lee the 2016 A.M. Turing Award on Tuesday, an honor that carries a $1 million prize as well as plenty of prestige. It's named for Alan Turing, the UK researcher who helped to crack Germany's Enigma code in World War II and who was instrumental in conceiving the fundamental design of computers.

Berners-Lee created the web's two seminal components: HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), the rules for describing how to construct a web page, and HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol), which governs how a web browser fetches a web page from a website. He also came up with the URL (Uniform Resource Locator), which gives everything on the web an address. Together, the three technologies mean you can click or tap hyperlinks to hop endlessly across the world's gargantuan repository of information.

Some of the ideas had been kicking around academia, but Berners-Lee refined them and transformed them into something practical: a way for researchers at the CERN particle accelerator laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, to share information.

That foundation has grown dramatically, making possible phenomena like Google's search engine and Facebook's social networking. There was just a single website when Berners-Lee launched http://info.cern.ch on August 6, 1991. Network monitoring firm Netcraft counted more than 1.76 billion websites in March.

A lot of work went into launching that original website. Berners-Lee first published his web technology proposal on March 12, 1989 -- the date considered the birthday of the web.

The web is notable for being built largely on open standards anybody can implement without paying a cent -- a strong contrast to how the software and networking businesses worked in the 1980s and 1990s. Companies like Google hold a lot of power, but still today, no single company controls the web the way Apple controls what you can see or do on an iPhone.

It's a striking success, but the web's future is by no means assured. The web often remains slow or awkward on mobile phones, devices that grow more important each year in our digital lives and that are the only computing device that millions of people worldwide own.

The apps we use often sidestep the web. You can't post a funny video to Snapchat or hail an Uber car with the web. And even when we view websites on our phones, for example by tapping a link shared in Twitter or Facebook apps, the website often opens within the app instead of in a full-fledged web browser.

Berners-Lee's invention faces another, more significant problem as well. Bogus information floods the web, perhaps most notably the "fake news" that plagued the 2016 US presidential election.

"Looking at recent events, we have very dysfunctional systems on the web," Berners-Lee said in a statement. "While it has achieved tremendous strides, the web isn't uniquely affirmed as a medium for the spread of truth and goodwill; it is also a medium for the spread of untruths and hatred."

Web fans and companies are taking action. Facebook and Mozilla, for example, are working with journalism partners to form the News Integrity Initiative. Facebook sometimes alerts you when it thinks you're about to post a link to a bogus piece, and Google has been refining its algorithms to suppress bogus information and spotlight fact checking.

At the same time, browser makers and web developers are taking on the app challenge with technology that makes websites more interactive. Online video chat on the web is now ordinary, and newer standards like Service Worker power technology known as progressive web apps, which are designed to work better on mobile devices in particular.

Earlier Turing Award winners include Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn, who co-created the internet; Douglas Engelbart, who invented the computer mouse; Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, who crafted the Unix operating system; Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman, who invented public key cryptography now instrumental to e-commerce and private communications; Len Adleman, Ron Rivest and Adi Shamir, who made that public key cryptography practical to use; and Ivan Sutherland, who pioneered graphical user interface technology.

Tech Enabled: CNET chronicles tech's role in providing new kinds of accessibility.</s>The inventor of the World Wide Web has won the so-called "Nobel Prize of computing."

The Association for Computing Machinery on Tuesday announced that Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of Oxford Professor Tim Berners-Lee has won the prestigious A.M. Turing Award for 2016. Berners-Lee is credited with inventing the World Wide Web, along with the first web browser and other technologies that have allowed the web to scale.

The award — which was named for British mathematician Alan M. Turing, who articulated the mathematical foundation and limits of computing — comes with a $1 million prize, provided by Google.

"I'm humbled to receive the namesake award of a computing pioneer who showed that what a programmer could do with a computer is limited only by the programmer themselves," Berners-Lee said in a statement. "It is an honor to receive an award like the Turing that has been bestowed to some of the most brilliant minds in the world."

Berners-Lee, who graduated from Oxford University with a degree in physics, submitted a proposal for the World Wide Web in 1989 while working at CERN, the European organization for nuclear research. As the story goes, he noticed that scientists were having a hard time sharing information via the internet, which was still in its infancy at the time. The system he envisioned would let staffers exchange documents using readable text and embedded hyperlinks.

In a statement, ACM President Vicki L. Hanson pointed out that the world's first website — http://info.cern.ch — went online in 1991, less than three decades ago.

"Although this doesn't seem that long ago, it is hard to imagine the world before Sir Tim Berners-Lee's invention," she said. "In many ways, the colossal impact of the World Wide Web is obvious. Many people, however, may not fully appreciate the underlying technical contributions that make the Web possible. Sir Tim Berners-Lee not only developed the key components, such as URIs [uniform resource identifiers] and web browsers that allow us to use the Web, but offered a coherent vision of how each of these elements would work together as part of an integrated whole."</s>The Father Of The Web Is Worried About How Ugly It's Become

These days the Web can seem like a dark place, filled with internet trolls and divisive discourse. But the man who invented the World Wide Web 28 years ago is still optimistic (sort of).

That man is Tim Berners-Lee, and on Tuesday he was awarded the prestigious Turing Award for his invention. It's an honor thought of as a Nobel Prize for computer science that comes with a $1 million award from Google.

Berners-Lee, a researcher at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, spoke to WBUR about his world-changing technology and what the Web has evolved into over the years.

Why he invented the Web

Berners-Lee created the Web in 1989 as a way for researchers to share information with each other on the Internet. He conceived of the idea while he was working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (better known as CERN). At that time, Berners-Lee says, scientists were using many different kinds of computers — Macs, PCs, minicomputers, etc. — and there was no way for these computers to talk to each other.

"It was designed to be universal. The whole point was breaking apart silos," he says.

He wanted to make communication easier. And he believed deeply in the power of a connected world to help us all work more efficiently and collaboratively across cultural boundaries.

"The idea was that it could put anything on it. I never imagined that it would kind of have everything on it," Berners-Lee says.

A side-note: Berners-Lee is also known to have introduced the first Web browser, the language for creating webpages (HTML) and essentially the algorithms that have allowed the Web to grow into what it is today.

On all those "nasty people" on the Web

Berners-Lee initially imagined the Web as a beautiful platform that could help us overcome national and cultural boundaries. He envisioned it would break down silos, but many people today believe the Web has created silos.

And he still largely sees the potential of the Web, but it has not turned out to be the complete cyber Utopian dream he had hoped. He's particularly worried about the dark side of social media — places where he says anonymity is being used by "misogynist bullies, by nasty people who just get a kick out of being nasty."

Berners-Lee has been thinking a lot lately about the power of his invention and the Pandora's box it has opened.

On the Web's most recent birthday (March 12), he wrote a sort of online manifesto that detailed three major challenges for the current state of the Web: personal data privacy, the spread of misinformation and the lack of transparency in online political advertising.

"I spent the first 20 years of the Web telling people, just give everybody unfettered nondiscriminatory access to the internet. Let people build websites, let them link to each other. Good stuff will happen," Berners-Lee says.

But now he's not as confident. In the last year, he's become increasingly worried about the Web's potential to live up to his vision as a tool for humanity.

He insists he's still an optimist (in the long-term), in part because he thinks the Web will inevitably evolve. It's "crazy to imagine the Web will remain just as it is," he says. Berners-Lee says the people designing the current networks need to adjust their strategies, and have to rethink their roles and ensure they make online spaces into "places where nice things happen."

But Berners-Lee doesn't believe the Web's current challenges can be fixed by tech experts alone.

"It's only gonna happen because lots of people care about it very much, and it's not just people writing code; it's people writing laws, teachers, people in the street," he says.</s>Most people who search on Google, share on Facebook and shop on Amazon have never heard of Sir Tim Berners-Lee. But they might not be doing any of those things had he not invented the World Wide Web. Berners-Lee, 61, is this year’s recipient of the AM Turing Award, computing’s version of the Nobel Prize.

The award, announced Tuesday by the Association for Computing Machinery, marks another pinnacle for the British native, who has already been knighted by Queen Elizabeth II and named as one of the 100 most important people of the 20th Century by Time magazine.

“It’s a crowning achievement,” Berners-Lee said in an interview with The Associated Press. ” But I think the award is for the Web as a project, and the massive international collaborative spirit of all that have joined me to help.” The honor comes with a $1 million prize funded by Google, one of many companies that made a fortune as a result of Berners-Lee’s efforts to make the internet more accessible. He managed that largely by figuring out a simple way to post documents, pictures and video everything, really, beyond plain text online.

Starting in 1989, Berners-Lee began working on ways digital object could be identified and retrieved through browser software capable of rendering graphics and other images. In August 1991, he launched the world’s first website, http://info.cern.ch .

Besides coming up with the web’s technical specifications, Berners-Lee “offered a coherent vision of how each of these elements would work together as part of an integrated whole,” said Vicki Hanson, president of the Association for Computing Machinery. In an even more significant move, Berners-Lee decided against patenting his technology and instead offered it as royalty-free software. That allowed other programmers to build upon the foundation he’d laid, spawning more than a billion websites today that have helped lure more than 3 billion people online.

The web’s widespread appeal gratifies Berners-Lee, who now splits his time shuttling between the U.S. and Britain as a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Oxford. But he fears parts of the web will become less accessible in the US if the Federal Communication Commission dismantles regulations protecting ” net neutrality.” That’s the principle that internet service providers should treat all websites equally instead of favoring some destinations that might be willing to pay for special treatment.

If the Trump administration tries to dump net neutrality, ” it’s going to have a fight on its hands because I think the American people realize it’s important,” Berners-Lee said. ” It allowed America to benefit from a thriving internet market for connectivity and content. It has become part of the spirit of America.”

Berners-Lee also worries about governments around the world using the internet as a surveillance tool, calling it a “recurrent threat.” He admits that preserving personal privacy as technology advances remains a thorny problem, one that he doesn’t have a ready solution for. But figuring that out is “really important to the future of society,” he says. “As an individual, I should be able to keep my own notes, keep my own journal and not share it with anybody. That is just part of being a person.”

Like several other prominent figures in technology, Berners-Lee isn’t sure if humanity will be better or worse off as computers grow better at thinking like people via artificial intelligence. “Computing has grown exponentially more powerful, so It’s only logical that it will get to the point when computers will become smarter than us,” Berners-Lee said. “So, yes, we should logically think about those consequences.”

This is the 50th anniversary of the A.M. Turing award, named after English computer scientist Alan Turing, whose revolutionary work with early computers and artificial intelligence helped crack Nazi Germany’s codes during World War II. Previous award winners include Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn, who did some of the pioneering work on the internet that Berners-Lee spun into the World Wide Web.

For all the latest Tech News, download Indian Express App now</s>SAN FRANCISCO—Most people who search on Google, share on Facebook and shop on Amazon have never heard of Sir Tim Berners-Lee. But they might not be doing any of those things had he not invented the World Wide Web.Berners-Lee, 61, is this year’s recipient of the A.M. Turing Award, computing’s version of the Nobel Prize.The award, announced Tuesday by the Association for Computing Machinery, marks another pinnacle for the British native, who has already been knighted by Queen Elizabeth II and named as one of the 100 most important people of the 20th Century by Time magazine.“It’s a crowning achievement,” Berners-Lee said in an interview with The Associated Press. “But I think the award is for the Web as a project, and the massive international collaborative spirit of all that have joined me to help.”The honour comes with a $1 million prize funded by Google, one of many companies that made a fortune as a result of Berners-Lee’s efforts to make the internet more accessible. He managed that largely by figuring out a simple way to post documents, pictures and video — everything, really, beyond plain text — online.Article Continued BelowSpinning the web Starting in 1989, Berners-Lee began working on ways digital object could be identified and retrieved through browser software capable of rendering graphics and other images. In August 1991, he launched the world’s first website, http://info.cern.ch .Besides coming up with the web’s technical specifications, Berners-Lee “offered a coherent vision of how each of these elements would work together as part of an integrated whole,” said Vicki Hanson, president of the Association for Computing Machinery.
English computer scientist Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee is awarded the 2016 A.M. Turing Award for inventing the World Wide Web, the first web browser, and the protocols and algorithms that allow the Web to scale.