Brief Description: "Father of the World Wide Web" and expectant father of the Semantic Web
Further Details:
In his book Weaving the Web, Berners-Lee tried to answer questions that had been thrown at him again and again ever since - Questions such as "What were you thinking when you invented it?" through "So what do you think of it now?" to "Where is this all going to take us?"
He didn't anticipate, even in 1999 when the book was published, that technologies like HTML, HTTP, and XML would take him just four years later to a knighthood and then to a $1.2 million award from the Finnish Technology Award Foundation, known informally as the "Finnish Nobel Prize."
"The original idea of the Web," Berners-Lee has always said, "was that it should be a collaborative space where you can communicate through sharing information. The idea was that by writing something together, and as people worked on it, they could iron out misunderstanding."
In 1994, he founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) a not-for-profit forum that aims to lead the Web to its full potential. He became Sir Tim Berners-Lee in 2000 when knighted by Queen Elizabeth II, and returned to the UK to take up a professorship at the University of Southampton.
"All sorts of things, too long for me to list here, are still out there waiting to be done." Berners-Lee said in his acceptance speech to the Finnish Technology Award Foundation. "There are so many new things to make, limited only by our imagination. And I think it's important for anybody who's going through school or college wondering what to do, to remember that now."
About Jeremy Geelan Jeremy Geelan is Sr. Vice-President of SYS-CON Media & Events. He is Conference Chair of the AJAXWorld RIA Conference & Expo series, of the all-new Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, of the 4th International Virtualization Conference & Expo and founder of Web 2.0 Journal, AJAX & RIA Journal and other major SYS-CON titles. From 2000-6, as first editorial director and then group publisher of SYS-CON Media, he was responsible for the development of all new titles and i-Technology portals for the firm, and regularly represents SYS-CON at conferences and trade shows, speaking to technology audiences both in North America and overseas. He is executive producer and presenter of "Power Panels with Jeremy Geelan" on SYS-CON.TV.
Justin Hart wrote: Vint
Cerf's name is Vinton
Cerf, not Vincent Cerf.
kjell krona wrote: In
your list of IT heroes, I
am missing some of the
important people involved
in the Graphical User
Interface, as first
instantiated in Macintosh
UI (and later was copied
by Microsoft):
Douglas Engelbart, who at
SRI in the 60's invented,
among other things, the
idea of a mouse,
overlapping windows,
hypertext, outlining,
video collaboration, and
many other things that
later inspired a lot of
people to improve
interaction with
computers;
Larry Tesler,
who at Xerox Parc
(working with Alan Kay on
Smalltalk) invented among
other things the modeless
editor and, I believe,
cut/copy/paste, and later
moved to Apple and worked
on the Lisa and
Macintosh;
Bill Atkinson, who wrote
the "Quickdraw" graphics
layer in Macintosh,
proving that advanced
bitmapped graphics was
possible on a low-end
processor; the orignal ...
Lars Arvestad wrote: ||
m6 commented on the 6 Feb
2007:
|| Can someone
explain to me why Jamie Z
is
|| a hero?
The word "hero" should of
course be used sparingly,
and probably not in
adjunction to "tech", but
JWZ holds his place among
the Big Hackers, IMHO.
Some of his
accomplishments, in no
particular order:
* XEmacs. He was one of
(the?) main people making
a user-friendly version
of GNU Emacs.
* XKeyCaps. This little
application has really
helped me getting a sane
keyboard layout under X a
few times.
* Mosaic. I believe he
was the main hacker on
the Unix version of the
first "real" browser. And
one of the first
employees at Netscape.
fm6 wrote: Can someone
explain to me why Jamie Z
is a hero? I only know
him from reading his
comments in the Netscape
keyboard resource file
when I was trying to get
the browser to behave
under Linux. These left
me with a permanent
dislike for the dude:
instead of explaining the
format of the file, he
put in lengthy sarcastic
(and misinformed) rants
about the "mistakes" made
by various Unix vendors
in designing their
keyboards.
Ron Blessing wrote: Every
time I see one of the
computer Hall of Fame
articles in a magazine
it seems to me there is
always one glaring
omission. I know there
are
many that have
contributed but I feel
like there are two people
that
deserve to be
mentioned and always seem
to be missed. Ward
Christensen
and Randy
Suess, in my opinion,
started what eventually
led to our
current Internet when
they launched the first
dialup Bulletin Board
system called CBBS. In
addition, Ward developed
the first widespread
file transfer protocol,
XMODEM, which allowed
files to be transferred
error free between
bulletin boards around
the world.
...Ron
Blessing
Grady Booch wrote: I'm
quite flatted that you've
numbered me among your
top twenty all-time
technology heroes.
As for the Renaissance
jazz bit, I play the
Celtic harp, on which I
perform a number of
medieval and renaissance
pieces. I once had an
instructor who taught me
some great
improvisational skills,
and thus the phrase,
Renaissance jazz, for I
like to do riffs off of
really old themes.
I think I would have been
an itinerant musician or
a priest if I were not
doing software :-)
Grady
InOtherNews wrote: Yakov
Fain has devised his own
version over here: http:/
/yakovfain.javadevelopers
journal.com/who_are_the_h
eroes_of_itechnology__my_
version.htm in case
anyone wants to take a
look.
More Nominees wrote:
There's a great
supplemetary list by Mark
Hinkle here: http://www.e
ncoreopus.com/content/vie
w/334/35/.
Among the new names he
adds are Jarkko
Oikarinen, Bram Cohen,
and Jerry Yang & David
Filo, the founders of
Yahoo!
i-net user wrote:
Congratulaions, you have
just insured that I will
never willing used AJAX
in any of my projects.
Your pop-over add that
blocks the article is
annoying at best.
kelley meck wrote: You
have to include Claude
Shannon, and you might
want to consider Oliver
Selfridge. Shannon was
the mathematician who
figured information
theory, and Selfridge
started everything behind
neural networks--which
have never caught up with
modal programming, but
whose promise is
unbounded.
Lee Butler wrote: You
should also remember
Michael J. Muuss. He
developed "ping" and was
instrumental in some of
the developments of
TCP/IP and Unix in the
early days. He worked at
the Army's Ballistic
Research Laboratory.
Carsten Schlemm wrote:
Jeremy,
I am a bit
disappointed you forgot
Konrad Zuse (http://en.wi
kipedia.org/wiki/Zuse).
His problem is that he
doesn't have an
Anglosaxon name....
Judge for yourself.
Cheers,
Carsten
w3c wrote: I would
nominate Dave Raggett
(W3C). Over the years,
Dave has been involved in
the design of many
important Web
Technologies, starting
with HTML (tables etc.),
CSS, VoiceXML, MathML and
XForms. He's also the
author of Tidy, an
important tool for Web
developers.
Mike Radow wrote:
Nomination for ''all-time
hero"...: "Paul Baran" (
go to www.google.com ) He
invented
_packet-switching_ (
funded by DARPA ) for the
ArpaNet.
-
He is certainly worthy of
your consideration.
Thanks!
Regards,
MikeRadow@yahoo.com
-
-eot-
Mike Radow wrote:
Nomination for ''all-time
hero"...: "Paul Baran" (
go to www.google.com ) He
invented
_packet-switching_ (
funded by DARPA ) for the
ArpaNet.
-
He is certainly worthy of
your consideration.
Thanks!
Regards,
MikeRadow@yahoo.com
-
-eot-
Mike Radow wrote:
Nomination for ''all-time
hero"...: "Paul Baran" (
go to www.google.com ) He
invented
_packet-switching_ (
funded by DARPA ) for the
ArpaNet.
-
He is certainly worthy of
your consideration.
Thanks!
Regards,
MikeRadow@yahoo.com
-
-eot-
Reminding people of how
its backing was the
making of Linux, IBM, to
no one's surprise, has
thrown its support behind
cloud computing, that
delicious nexus of every
chi-chi buzzword
technology currently in
vogue: Web 2.0, rich
Internet applications,
software-as-a-service,
SOA, grid com
'While the last decade
was focused on the Web,
the next phase in the
evolution of our industry
will be on the
convergence of Web,
mobile and desktop
applications and the
ability to extend
existing applications
with these new
technologies for a
consistent user
experience regardless of
h
Scrapboy Digital Media
Corporation announced the
availability of Scrapboy,
its Facebook desktop
application, to users in
North America. Scrapboy
allows users to stay
connected with their
friends' Facebook
activities on their
desktops and store those
activities securely on
the users' co
Web 2.0 tools are doing a
wonderful job of
providing consumers with
cool and productive new
ways of performing
common, simple tasks over
the Internet. These tools
primarily perform a
single task such as
allowing consumers to
manage their photos, read
their favorite newsfeeds,
express t
Two of the biggest
launches in Rich Internet
Application history took
place in 2007/2008 when
Adobe launched AIR 1.0 in
February '08 and
Microsoft launched
Silverlight (September
'07). At the 6th
International AJAXWorld
RIA Conference & Expo in
October SYS-CON Events is
delighted to be
SUBSCRIBE TO THE WORLD'S MOST POWERFUL NEWSLETTERS
SUBSCRIBE TO OUR RSS FEEDS & GET YOUR SYS-CON NEWS LIVE!
Click to Add our RSS Feeds to the Service of Your Choice:
About Newsfeeds / Video Feeds
.gif)
Reminding people of how
its backing was the
making of Linux, IBM, to
no one's surprise, has
thrown its support behind
cloud computing, that
delicious nexus of every
chi-chi buzzword
technology currently in
vogue: Web 2.0, rich
Internet applications,
software-as-a-service,
SOA, grid com
'While the last decade
was focused on the Web,
the next phase in the
evolution of our industry
will be on the
convergence of Web,
mobile and desktop
applications and the
ability to extend
existing applications
with these new
technologies for a
consistent user
experience regardless of
h 
Web 2.0 tools are doing a
wonderful job of
providing consumers with
cool and productive new
ways of performing
common, simple tasks over
the Internet. These tools
primarily perform a
single task such as
allowing consumers to
manage their photos, read
their favorite newsfeeds,
express t
Two of the biggest
launches in Rich Internet
Application history took
place in 2007/2008 when
Adobe launched AIR 1.0 in
February '08 and
Microsoft launched
Silverlight (September
'07). At the 6th
International AJAXWorld
RIA Conference & Expo in
October SYS-CON Events is
delighted to be
