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Berners-Lee worked in a sawmill for extra cash during his studies at university. He was a free-lance software engineer doing a six-month stint at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, in Geneva. CERN did not ask Berners-Lee to invent the www nor did they invent it as some people may like to think. But Berners-Lee could have been working for anyone at the time when he realised his personal interest. In this respect he was in his spare time doodling around with a way to organize his far-flung notes. He had always been interested in programs that dealt with information in a "brain-like way", but that could improve upon that occasionally memory-constrained organ. So he devised a piece of software that could, as he put it, keep "track of all the random associations one comes across in real life and brains are supposed to be so good at remembering but sometimes mine wouldn't". He continued and in his own time eventually created the WWW. If he had kept it for himself he would have been the richest person ever and made Bill Gates look like a pauper. |