The Postcard
A postally unused postcard that was published by Lévy Fils et Cie of Paris. The card, which was printed in France, has a divided back.
Hansom Cabs
Note the Hansom cabs waiting outside Queen's College.
The Hansom cab was designed and patented by Joseph Hansom, an architect from York.
Originally called the Hansom safety cab, it was designed to combine speed with safety, with a low centre of gravity for safe cornering.
'Cab' is a shortening of 'cabriolet', reflecting the design of the carriage.
Hansom cabs were immensely popular as they were fast, and light enough to be pulled by a single horse (making the journey cheaper than travelling in a larger four-wheeled coach).
They were also agile enough to steer through heavy traffic, and gave the operator a view of the road from a relatively high position.
Hansom cabs were widely used in the UK until 1908 when Taximeter cars (petrol cabs) were introduced. By 1920, horse-drawn cabs had been largely superseded by motor vehicles.
Queen's College Oxford
Queen's College was founded in 1341 by Robert de Eglesfield in honour of Queen Philippa of Hainaut (wife of King Edward III of England). The college is distinguished by its predominantly neoclassical architecture, which includes buildings designed by Sir Christopher Wren and Nicholas Hawksmoor.
In April 2012, as part of the celebrations of the Diamond Jubilee of Elizabeth II, a series of commemorative stamps were released featuring A-Z pictures of famous British landmarks. Queen's College's front quad was used on the Q stamp, alongside other landmarks such as the Angel of the North on A and the Old Bailey on O.
In 2015, the college had an endowment of £265 million, making it the fifth wealthiest college (after St. John's, Christ Church, All Souls and Merton).
The most famous feast of the College is the Boar's Head Gaudy, which originally was the Christmas Dinner for members of the College who were unable to return home over the Christmas break between terms, but is now a feast for old members of the College on the Saturday before Christmas.
Alumni of Queen's include:
-- Tony Abbott, 28th. Prime Minister of Australia
-- Rowan Atkinson, actor and comedian, known for Blackadder and Mr. Bean
-- Jeremy Bentham, English philosopher, and legal and social reformer
-- Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web
-- Cory Booker, United States Senator from New Jersey
-- Eric Garcetti, Mayor of Los Angeles
-- Leonard Hoffmann, Baron Hoffmann, English jurist and judge
-- Edmund Halley, English astronomer
-- King Henry V of England
-- Edwin Powell Hubble, American astronomer
-- Sir John Peel, gynaecologist to H.M. Queen Elizabeth II
-- Leopold Stokowski, conductor.
'Oxford in War-Time'
During the Great War, a man named W. Snow was inspired to write a poem called 'Oxford in War-Time'.
Snow prefaces his poem with the following:
'The Boat Race will not be held this year (1915). The
whole of last year's Oxford eight and the great majority
of the cricket and football teams are serving the King'.
The poem is as follows:
'Under the tow-path past the barges
Never an eight goes flashing by;
Never a blatant coach on the marge is
Urging his crew to do or die;
Never the critic we knew enlarges,
Fluent, on How and Why!
Once by the Iffley Road November
Welcomed the Football men aglow,
Covered with mud, as you'll remember,
Eager to vanquish Oxford's foe.
Where are the teams of last December?
Gone - where they had to go!
Where are her sons who waged at cricket
Warfare against the foeman-friend?
Far from the Parks, on a harder wicket,
Still they attack and still defend;
Playing a greater game, they'll stick it,
Fearless until the end!
Oxford's goodliest children leave her,
Hastily thrusting books aside;
Still the hurrying weeks bereave her,
Filling her heart with joy and pride;
Only the thought of you can grieve her,
You who have fought and died'.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee
Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee OM KBE FRS RDI FRSA DFBCS FREng was born on the 8th. June 1955. Also known as TimBL, he is an English computer scientist, best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web, the HTML markup language, the URL system, and HTTP.
He is a professorial research fellow at the University of Oxford, and a professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Berners-Lee proposed an information management system on the 12th. March 1989, and implemented the first successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and server via the Internet in mid-November.
He devised and implemented the first Web browser and Web server, and helped foster the Web's subsequent explosive development. He is the founder and director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which oversees the continued development of the Web.
Tim co-founded (with Rosemary Leith) the World Wide Web Foundation. In April 2009, he was elected as Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences.
Berners-Lee is a senior researcher and holder of the 3Com founder's chair at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He is a director of the Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI), and a member of the advisory board of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence.
In 2011, he was named as a member of the board of trustees of the Ford Foundation. He is a founder and president of the Open Data Institute, and is currently an advisor at social network MeWe.
In 2004, Berners-Lee was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his pioneering work. He received the 2016 Turing Award:
"... for inventing the World Wide Web, the first
web browser, and the fundamental protocols
and algorithms allowing the Web to scale".
He was named in Time magazine's list of the 100 Most Important People of the 20th. century, and has received many other accolades for his invention.
-- Tim Berners-Lee - The Early Years
Tim Berners-Lee was born in London, the son of mathematicians and computer scientists Mary Lee Woods (1924–2017) and Conway Berners-Lee (1921–2019). His parents were both from Birmingham, and worked on the Ferranti Mark 1, the first commercially-built computer.
He has three younger siblings; his brother, Mike, is a professor of ecology and climate change management.
Berners-Lee attended Sheen Mount Primary School, then attended Emanuel School (a direct grant grammar school at the time) from 1969 to 1973. A keen trainspotter as a child, he learnt about electronics from tinkering with a model railway.
From 1973 to 1976, he studied at The Queen's College, Oxford, where he received a first-class BA in physics. While there, he made a computer out of an old television set he had purchased from a repair shop.
-- Tim Berners-Lee's Career and Research
After graduation, Berners-Lee worked as an engineer at the telecommunications company Plessey in Poole, Dorset.
In 1978, he joined D. G. Nash in Ferndown, Dorset, where he helped create typesetting software for printers.
Berners-Lee worked as an independent contractor at CERN from June to December 1980. While in Geneva, he proposed a project based on the concept of hypertext, to facilitate sharing and updating information among researchers.
To demonstrate it, he built a prototype system named ENQUIRE.
After leaving CERN in late 1980, Tim went to work at John Poole's Image Computer Systems Ltd. in Bournemouth, Dorset, where he ran the company's technical side for three years.
The project he worked on was a "real-time remote procedure call" which gave him experience in computer networking. In 1984, he returned to CERN as a fellow.
In 1989, CERN was the largest Internet node in Europe, and Berners-Lee saw an opportunity to join hypertext with the Internet:
"I just had to take the hypertext idea and
connect it to the TCP and DNS ideas and—
ta-da!—the World Wide Web."
Tim also recalled:
"Creating the web was really an act of desperation,
because the situation without it was very difficult
when I was working at CERN later.
Most of the technology involved in the web, like the
hypertext, like the Internet, multifont text objects,
had all been designed already.
I just had to put them together. It was a step of
generalising, going to a higher level of abstraction,
thinking about all the documentation systems out
there as being possibly part of a larger imaginary
documentation system."
Berners-Lee wrote his proposal in March 1989 and, in 1990, redistributed it. It was accepted by his manager, Mike Sendall, who called his proposals:
"Vague, but exciting."
Robert Cailliau had independently proposed a project to develop a hypertext system at CERN, and joined Berners-Lee as a partner in his efforts to get the web off the ground. They used similar ideas to those underlying the ENQUIRE system to create the World Wide Web, for which Berners-Lee designed and built the first web browser.
Tim's software also functioned as an editor (called WorldWideWeb, running on the NeXTSTEP operating system), and the first Web server, CERN HTTPd (short for Hypertext Transfer Protocol daemon).
Berners-Lee published the first web site, which described the project itself, on the 20th. December 1990; it was available to the Internet from the CERN network.
The site provided an explanation of what the World Wide Web was, and how people could use a browser and set up a web server, as well as how to get started with your own website.
On the 6th. August 1991, Berners-Lee first posted, on Usenet, a public invitation for collaboration with the WorldWideWeb project.
In a list of 80 cultural moments that shaped the world, chosen by a panel of 25 eminent scientists, academics, writers and world leaders, the invention of the World Wide Web was ranked number one, with the entry stating:
"The fastest growing communications medium
of all time, the Internet has changed the shape
of modern life forever. We can connect with
each other instantly, all over the world."
In 1994, Berners-Lee founded the W3C at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It comprised various companies that were willing to create standards and recommendations to improve the quality of the Web.
Berners-Lee made his idea available freely, with no patent and no royalties due. The World Wide Web Consortium decided that its standards should be based on royalty-free technology, so that they easily could be adopted by anyone.
In 2001, Berners-Lee became a patron of the East Dorset Heritage Trust, having previously lived in Colehill in Wimborne, East Dorset. In December 2004, he accepted a chair in computer science at the School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, Hampshire, to work on the Semantic Web.
In a Times article in October 2009, Berners-Lee admitted that the initial pair of slashes ("//") in a web address were "unnecessary". He told the newspaper that he easily could have designed web addresses without the slashes. In his lighthearted apology he said:
"There you go, it seemed like
a good idea at the time."
-- Tim Berners-Lee's Policy Work
In June 2009, then-British prime minister Gordon Brown announced that Berners-Lee would work with the UK government in order to help make data more open and accessible on the Web, building on the work of the Power of Information Task Force.
Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt are the two key figures behind data.gov.uk, a UK government project to open up almost all data acquired for official purposes for free re-use.
Commenting on the opening up of Ordnance Survey data in April 2010, Berners-Lee said:
"The changes signal a wider cultural change
in government, based on an assumption that
information should be in the public domain
unless there is a good reason not to — not
the other way around."
He went on to say:
"Greater openness, accountability and
transparency in Government will give
people greater choice and make it
easier for individuals to get more
directly involved in issues that matter
to them."
In November 2009, Berners-Lee launched the World Wide Web Foundation (WWWF) in order to campaign:
"To advance the Web to empower humanity
by launching transformative programs that
build local capacity to leverage the Web as
a medium for positive change".
Berners-Lee is one of the pioneer voices in favour of net neutrality, and has expressed the view that:
"ISPs should supply connectivity with no strings
attached, and should neither control nor monitor
the browsing activities of customers without their
expressed consent."
Tim advocates the idea that net neutrality is a kind of human network right:
"Threats to the Internet, such as companies
or governments that interfere with or snoop
on Internet traffic, compromise basic human
network rights."
As of May 2012, Tim is president of the Open Data Institute, which he co-founded with Nigel Shadbolt in 2012.
The Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI) was launched in October 2013, and Berners-Lee is leading the coalition of public and private organisations that includes Google, Facebook, Intel and Microsoft.
The A4AI seeks to make Internet access more affordable, so that access is broadened in the developing world, where only 31% of people are online. Berners-Lee is working with those aiming to decrease Internet access prices so that they fall below the UN Broadband Commission's worldwide target of 5% of monthly income.
Berners-Lee holds the founders chair in Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he heads the Decentralized Information Group and is leading Solid, a joint project with the Qatar Computing Research Institute that aims to radically change the way Web applications work today, resulting in true data ownership as well as improved privacy.
In October 2016, he joined the Department of Computer Science at Oxford University as a professorial research fellow, and as a fellow of Christ Church, one of the Oxford colleges.
From the mid-2010's Berners-Lee initially remained neutral on the emerging Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) proposal with its controversial digital rights management (DRM) implications.
In March 2017 he felt he had to take a position which was to support the EME proposal. He reasoned EME's virtues whilst noting DRM was inevitable. As W3C director, he went on to approve the finalised specification in July 2017.
Tim's stance was opposed by some, including Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the anti-DRM campaign, Defective by Design, and the Free Software Foundation. Varied concerns raised included being not supportive of the Internet's open philosophy against commercial interests, and risks of users being forced to use a particular web browser to view specific DRM content.
The EFF raised a formal appeal which did not succeed, and the EME specification became a formal W3C recommendation in September 2017.
On the 30th. September 2018, Berners-Lee announced his new open-source startup Inrupt to fuel a commercial ecosystem around the Solid project, which aims to give users more control over their personal data and lets them choose where the data goes, who's allowed to see certain elements and which apps are allowed to see that data.
In November 2019 at the Internet Governance Forum in Berlin Berners-Lee and the WWWF launched Contract for the Web, a campaign initiative to persuade governments, companies and citizens to commit to nine principles to stop "misuse", with the warning that:
"Ff we don't act now – and act together –
to prevent the web being misused by
those who want to exploit, divide and
undermine, we are at risk of squandering
its potential for good."
-- Tim Berners-Lee's Awards and Honours
Tim Berners-Lee's entry in Time magazine's list of the 100 Most Important People of the 20th century (March 1999) reads as follows:
"He wove the World Wide Web and created a mass
medium for the 21st century. The World Wide Web
is Berners-Lee's alone. He designed it. He loosed it
on the world. And he more than anyone else has
fought to keep it open, nonproprietary and free."
Berners-Lee has received many awards and honours. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in the 2004 New Year Honours:
"For services to the global development
of the Internet."
On the 13th. June 2007, he was appointed to the Order of Merit (OM), an order restricted to 24 living members, plus any honorary members. Bestowing membership of the Order of Merit is within the personal purview of the Sovereign, and does not require recommendation by ministers or the Prime Minister.
Tim was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2001. He was also elected as a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2004 and the National Academy of Engineering in 2007.
He has been conferred honorary degrees from a number of universities around the world, including Manchester (his parents worked on the Manchester Mark 1 in the 1940's), Harvard and Yale.
In 2012, Berners-Lee was among the British cultural icons selected by artist Sir Peter Blake to appear in a new version of his most famous artwork – the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover – to celebrate the British cultural figures of his life that he most admires to mark his 80th. birthday.
In 2013, he was awarded the inaugural Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering. On the 4th. April 2017, Tim received the 2016 Association for Computing Machinery's Turing Award for his invention of the World Wide Web, the first web browser, and their fundamental protocols and algorithms.
-- Tim Berners-Lee's Personal Life
Berners-Lee has said
"I like to keep work and
personal life separate."
Berners-Lee married Nancy Carlson, an American computer programmer, in 1990. She was also working in Switzerland at the World Health Organization. They had two children and divorced in 2011.
In 2014, he married Rosemary Leith at the Chapel Royal, St. James's Palace in London. Leith is a Canadian Internet and banking entrepreneur, and a founding director of Berners-Lee's World Wide Web Foundation. The couple also collaborate on venture capital to support artificial intelligence companies.
Berners-Lee was raised as an Anglican, but he turned away from religion in his youth. After he became a parent, he became a Unitarian Universalist (UU). When asked whether he believes in God, he stated:
"Not in the sense of most people, I'm
atheist and Unitarian Universalist."
The web's source code was auctioned by Sotheby's in London in 2021, as a non-fungible token (NFT) by TimBL. Selling for US$5,434,500, it was reported the proceeds would be used to fund initiatives by TimBL and Leith.
