The most powerful communications tool of all time, the World Wide Web was invented by Englishman Tim Berners-Lee in 1991.

Born in London, his parents were both mathematicians who were employed on the research team which built one of the earliest computers - the Manchester Mark I.

Brought up with an appreciation of mathematics from an early age, he attended Queen's College at Oxford University where used a soldering iron, an M6800 processor and an old television to build his first computer.

His interests in pushing the boundaries of computing technology were in evidence during his college days, no more so than when he was banned from using the university computer for trying to hack into private files.

Berners-Lee joined Plessey Telecommunications in 1976 as a programmer and in 1978, he worked at D.G. Nash Ltd where he wrote typesetting software and an operating system.

While an independent contractor at Organization for Nuclear Research, known more widely as CERN, in June to December 1980 he proposed a project based on the concept of hypertext, to aid the sharing of research and during his time there built a prototype system he called ‘Equire’.

During his second spell with CERN in 1984, He saw an opportunity to join hypertext with the Internet:

"I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Domian Name System (DNS).”

“I found it frustrating that in those days, there was different information on different computers, but you had to log on to different computers to get at it. Also, sometimes you had to learn a different program on each computer. So finding out how things worked was really difficult. Often it was just easier to go and ask people when they were having coffee.

“Because people at CERN came from universities all over the world, they brought with them all types of computers. Not just Unix, Mac and PC: there were all kinds of big mainframe computer and medium sized computers running all sorts of software.

“I actually wrote some programs to take information from one system and convert it so it could be inserted into another system. I was doing this over and over. And when you are a programmer, and you solve one problem and then you solve one that's very similar, you often think, "Isn't there a better way? Can't we just fix this problem for good?" That became "Can't we convert every information system so that it looks like part of some imaginary information system which everyone can read?" And that became the WWW.”

In 1990, he produced a revision of his initial Enquire proposal, which was approved by his line manager. Using similar ideas to those he outlined in his Enquire system to create the World Wide Web, Berners- Lee designed and built the first web browser and first Web server called the HyperText Transfer Protocol Daemon (httpd).

The first Web site - http://info.cern.ch/ went live on August 6, 1991 and was created to explain what the WWW was and how people could browse the information for themselves using a web server.

Fifteen years on, the World Wide Web consists of over one billion websites and is the greatest forum by which people around the world can share values, customs and experiences or sell goods and services.

To prevent the misuse of the Internet and help drive best practice, Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in 1994.

Today, he is working on a new project as chair of the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton.

The ‘Semantic Web’ is a project which aims to create a universal medium for information exchange by developing a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across different software applications and programming languages.

While Berners-Lee has already left mankind one of the greatest legacies in the history of invention, he isn’t finished just yet.

His Semantic Web will allow us to search for information even more efficiently than we do today and will creating an IT and communications tool infinitely more powerful.

...The Web

The World Wide Web is often mistakenly used as a synonym for the Internet itself, but the Web is actually something that is available via the Internet, just like e-mail and many other Internet services.

...The Semantic Web..

This will allow us to search across programming languages more effectively than we do today. Instead of using a search engine to pull up a list of relevant websites, the Semantic Web will cross reference more information sources to help us find what we are looking for whether it be instant market intelligence or  the perfect holiday.