Come along, ladies and gentlemen! We are going to search out places where serious props are due!
In our first installment, a big round of applause to one of the people who has quite literally made all of this possible. As with everything, there is a history, and standing on the shoulders of giants and all that, but sometimes a moment in time comes along where an individual sees something clearly, a light goes on, and BANG! In this case - The World Wide Web.
It is my honor to present to you... Sir Tim Berners Lee!!
I won't rehash the entire wikipedia article here, you can read it for yourself as it is a great one (and please DO follow all the links), but here is the Ultra Compressed Version of the story, and yes, he is a knight.
Mr. Lee is a physicist who was freelancing at CERN (a european organization which does heavy-duty physics research) in 1980. ** You may have recently heard of CERN due to their "Large Hadron Collider", which some people believe is going to create a black hole and implode the earth and everything around it, which is a very entertaining idea.
Mr. Lee's crucial moment of insight came when he thought of connecting three separate technologies: hyperlinked text (links), TCP/IP (a protocol for data transmission), and DNS (Domain Name System - which basically figures out where a certain website is located).
To quote the man himself: "I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the Transmission Control Protocol and domain name system ideas and — ta-da! — the World Wide Web." Sounds pretty easy..
Currently, Tim Berners Lee is the Director of the W3C (the World Wide Web Consortium, where as I imagine it, a bunch of English dudes sit around and talk loftily about various obscure HTML tags), Professor of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at MIT, and an advisor at the MIT center for Collective Intelligence. In other words, this guy is pretty much as badass as you can get.
Once again, a round of applause and a special serving of *Props* goes out to our very own Sir Tim Berners Lee for inventing the World Wide Web!
Until next time, readers!
Bonus Round:
Here is a link to a copy of the first website ever, developed by Tim Berners Lee: http://www.w3.org/History/19921103-hypertext/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html
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