Sir Tim Berners-Lee Named Greatest Briton

mOoZik writes "BBC News is reporting that Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the World Wide Web, has been named the Greatest Briton of 2004. Berners-Lee had this to say about the honor: 'I am very proud to be British, it is great fun to be British and this award is just an amazing honour.'"

Comments

Re:And typically there are some doubters

[ninthwave]

Thats odd as one of the points Sir Tim Berners-Lee was making with all the British papers who were asking him how rich he would be if he had patented "his" idea, was it was not his idea, it was just using things already invented together, and tweaking it for sharing. He himself seems to acknowledge the simple principle that science and technology is a building process off the works of our forefathers in our fields.

He is very humble about it as he does not see it as a pure invention, the press on the other hand just can't be bothered to learn. The web needs an inventor. Did Edison invent the light bulb?

Something in the human condition needs this widget here was made by inventor Goosebury. Why I don't know, maybe we understand ideas better when we have a psychology to project the idea onto.

Looked up some historical links...

[Jugalator]

OK, I did some searching for the Neowin article on this, and can just as well post it here too.
It's a bunch of fun historical documents. ;-)

- Screenshot of Tim-Berner Lee's web browser/editor gizmo (apparently two apps in one suite, kinda like Mozilla?)
- Web page (from 1992) describing a very early version of HTML
- Description of the web (from 1992)*
- The original WWW proposal from 1989**
- History of the web

* = It tells you why the WWW was made... "Tim decided that high energy physics needed a networked hypertext system and CERN was an ideal site for the development of wide-area hypertext ideas"

** = excerpt: "Note that the only name I had for it at this time was "Mesh" -- I decided on "World Wide Web" when writing the code in 1990."