University of Southampton
Academics working at the university include Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, Wendy Hall, inventor of Microcosm (hypermedia system) a predecessor of the World Wide Web, founding director of the Web Science Trust between the University of Southampton and MIT, José Antonio Bowen, President of Goucher College and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Erich Zepler, who made leading contributions to radio receiver development, David Payne, who invented EDFA for use in fibre optics cables, Sir Barry Cunliffe, a pioneer of modern British archaeology, Ray Monk, the biographer of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Albie Sachs, former Judge of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, and Tim Holt, former President of the Royal Statistical Society and Office for National Statistics.
Libwww
In 1991 and 1992, Tim Berners-Lee and a student at CERN named Jean-Francois Groff rewrote various components of the original WorldWideWeb browser for the NeXTstep operating system in portable C code, in order to demonstrate the potential of the World Wide Web. In the beginning libwww was referred to as the "Common Library" and was not available as a separate product. Before becoming generally available, libwww was integrated in the CERN program library (CERNLIB). In July 1992 the library was ported to DECnet. In the May 1993 World Wide Web Newsletter Berners-Lee announced that the Common Library was now called libwww and was licensed as public domain to encourage the development of web browsers. He initially considered releasing the software under the GNU General Public License, rather than into the public domain, but decided against it due to concerns that large corporations such as IBM would be deterred from using it by the restrictions of the GPL. The rapid early development of the library caused Robert Cailliau problems when integrating it into his MacWWW browser.