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On a sidenote, did you know that on this special day "Friday 13^th" there are 3 to 5 times as many people absent from work than on a normal day, according to a statistic. "Friday 13^th" occured twice already this year and the next one will be in November

Back to topic, on 13^th March 2009 the world wide web is getting 20 years old.
On this day in the year 1989 Tim Berners-Lee presented his draft "Information Management - A Proposal". This draft, one may say, changed the face of the earth.

Tim, a british computer scientist had been working at the institute CERN and was working on improvements to the workflow at the institute. At first his draft didn't find the support of his superiors and their reply is now in a showcase at the CERN.
In 1984 the 33-year old Tim came to work at the institute CERN where he found too many different methods for filing and processing of scientific findings, so he searched for a better one. He had to work hard to convince the experts of the advantages of his works. There was no forum to spread the word.

Three important facts

1. He developped the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) which describes how pages are formatted with links to show up on different computer platforms.
2. With the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) he defined a language for communication over the internet. Additionally he found a scheme to address the documents with the Universal Resource Identifier (URI)
3. Finally it would need a browser to render these documents, which was missing at this time.So he setup a server on his computer on the christmas eve 1990. But for most PC users worldwide it was not accessible for the lack of a user-friendly browser.
   

World Wide Web

In a formal act in 1993 the institute CERN made the www accessible for everybody without any licence fees.
Around the same time the student Marc Andreessen developped his first Mosaic Browser and later on together with Netscape his software was the leading online platform.

Tim Berners-Lee went 1994 to USA, where he is now director at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
He was decorated by Queen Elisabeth II. with  «Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire» and in the year 1997 awarded wih «Order of Merit» which is limited to just 24 persons.
In spite of all his merits he doesn't belong to the group of richest people in the world.