Net inventor W3C chief Berners-Lee honoured

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, as he becomes, is credited with inventing the World Wide Web and is presently director of the World Wide Web Consortium or W3C. The rank of Knight Commander is the second highest rank of the Order of the British Empire.

This is an honour that is clearly merited. The invention of the Internet has been a real benefit to mankind and the communications innovation of our generation. But Sir Tim, who is now 48 and lives in the US reacted with typical modesty.

'This is an honor which applies to the whole Web development community, and to the inventors and developers of the Internet, whose work made the Web possible,' said in a statement on his website.

'I accept this as an endorsement of the spirit of the Web; of building it in a decentralized way; of making best efforts to keep it open and fair; and of ensuring its fundamental technologies are available to all for broad use and innovation, and without having to pay licensing fees.'

As an Oxford student he built his first computer using a soldering iron, an old television and other parts.

In 1980 Sir Tim wrote the first program for storing information using the kind of random associations that the brain makes. At this time he was working as a consultant software engineer at CERN the European particle physics laboratory in Geneva. His Enquire program formed the conceptual basis for the future development of the Web.

Also while at CERN in 1989, he conceived a global hypertext project. This allowed people to work together by combining their knowledge in a Web of hypertext documents. As history tells the hypertext project became known as the World Wide Web.

The program, WorldWideWeb, was first made available within CERN in December 1990. And all of Berners-Lee's code became available on the Internet in the summer of 1991.

In 1994, Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium. The W3C coordinates Web development worldwide. Its objective is to lead the Web to its full potential, ensuring its stability through rapid evolution and revolutionary transformations of its usage.

The W3C remains unique resource for Internet developers around the world. AME Info and the many millions of other websites around the world owe a huge debt of gratitude to Sir Tim, and this knighthood is overdue and richly deserved.