Tim Berners-Lee wins $1 million Turing Award

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Tim Berners-Lee wins $1 million Turing Award



[font size=1]Tim Berners-Lee was honored with the Turing Award for his work inventing the World Wide Web, the first web browser, and "the fundamental protocols and algorithms {that allowed} the web to scale." Photo: Henry Thomas[/font]

CSAIL researcher honored for inventing the web and developing the protocols that spurred its global use.

Adam Conner-Simons | CSAIL
April 4, 2017

MIT Professor Tim Berners-Lee, the researcher who invented the World Wide Web and is one of the world’s most influential voices for online privacy and government transparency, has won the most prestigious honor in computer science, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) A.M. Turing Award. Often referred to as “the Nobel Prize of computing,” the award comes with a $1 million prize provided by Google.

In its announcement today, ACM cited Berners-Lee for “inventing the World Wide Web, the first web browser, and the fundamental protocols and algorithms allowing the web to scale.” This year marks the 50th anniversary of the award.

A principal investigator at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) with a joint appointment in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Berners-Lee conceived of the web in 1989 at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) as a way to allow scientists around the world to share information with each other on the internet. He introduced a naming scheme (URIs), a communications protocol (HTTP), and a language for creating webpages (HTML). His open-source approach to coding the first browser and server is often credited with helping catalyzing the web’s rapid growth.
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Berners-Lee is founder and director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which sets technical standards for web development, as well as the World Wide Web Foundation, which aims to establish the open web as a public good and a basic right. He also holds a professorship at Oxford University.

[hunter]

1. Sometimes you give something wonderful to the world and the world gives back.

Imagine how wretched it would be if the world wide web was divided up like cable television channels and maybe your telecommunications company didn't even offer access to sites like DU.

[Orrex]

3. Well, give it a few years.

We'll get there soon enough under a Trump/Pence regime.

[dalton99a]

2. Untold wealth was generated because of him.

[mwooldri]

4. "This thread is useless without pictures".

Sir Tim's creation allowed text and pictures to be shown together via one software application... at the outset. All other Internet apps at the time had text at its core (email, Usenet, Gopher, etc), and viewing pictures was at times hard work. Certainly made Internet porn easier (lol - isn't that what helped the home videocassette market?)

But the biggest thing is that he kept it open. Free. Libre. Had Gopher (predecessor to hypertext) been open, we could be "Gophering" instead of "surfing" the Internet.

Some are criticising him lately for wanting to include some form of digital rights management (DRM) as a standard into HTML. I disagree; DRM is here to stay and I think it would be helpful to have a standard DRM system so that a startup competitor to Netflix can compete on a level playing field, knowing that they can use the standard system and keep Hollywood happy.

Sir Tim's deserves the award. In my mind he is in Alan Turing's league, albeit with a different type of genius.

[mahatmakanejeeves]

5. The ASCII Ribbon Campaign

I'm sure it won't display properly here. Too bad. Rarely, I'll put it in an email.

ASCII Ribbon Campaign

The ASCII ribbon campaign was an Internet phenomenon started in 1998 advocating that email be sent only in plain text, because of inefficiencies or dangers of using HTML email. Proponents placed ASCII art in their signature blocks, meant to look like an awareness ribbon, along with a message or link to an advocacy site:

{snip the displays; they don't work here.}

Well, try this then:

[hunter]

7. Partly owing to the lack of security in Microsoft Windows.

A malicious email could take over your machine.

Not to mention the damned <blink> tag.

My own email then was set up to strip out all html and I told people if they used it I wouldn't see it.

[MineralMan]

6. Damned Boomers! Taking All the Credit!