Tim Berners Lee, the electric trains and why we don’t know what he eats for breakfast

On 8 June 1955 he was born in London Tim Berners-Lee. Without him the world would probably be worse. Internet without a doubt. Before the world wide web it was a thing for very few: after it became the network that unites most of the inhabitants of the planet. The story of how and why and when he invented the www (and html, the language in which most sites are made), is well known.

Since today is his 66th birthday, I want to focus on the first years of life. How was he as a child? A genius? A predestined? A little predestined, yes: the first of four siblings, his parents were considered two pioneers in computer science: his mother, Mary Lee Woods she was a mathematician and one of the first computer programmers of the time; worked for a giant of the time, Ferranti, which had put on the market one of the first commercial computers, the Mark 1. Here he meets Conway Berners-Lee, they get married immediately and Timothy is born, for us Tim.

What was he like as a child? He tells it himself in an autobiographical book: “I grew up in South West London. I was not good at sports. At 11, going to school, I fell in love with trains: the school was between two train tracks and I stopped to look at them. even a little train in my little room, with a four-track circuit and a station in the center and tunnels. I enjoyed building electronic instruments to better control trains. And in the end I discovered that I liked electronics more than little trains. A few years after college I built a computer by myself from an old TV bought from a junk dealer for a few dollars “.

Tim Berners-Lee is a nice person, modest, reserved, who has not stopped trying to make the web (and the world) better. When asked about his private life he replies: “If you had written a program like the world wide web, what is it possible, would you like everyone to know what you eat for breakfast? No, see? Thanks for understanding.”