Berners-Lee receives computing’s version of the Nobel Prize
MOST people who search on Google, share on Facebook and shop on Amazon have never heard of Sir Tim Berners-Lee. But they might not be doing any of those things had he not invented the World Wide Web.
Berners-Lee, 61, is this year’s recipient of the AM Turing Award, computing’s version of the Nobel Prize.
The award, announced yesterday by the Association for Computing Machinery, marks another pinnacle for the British native, who has already been knighted by Queen Elizabeth II and named as one of the 100 most important people of the 20th Century by Time magazine.
“It’s a crowning achievement,” Berners-Lee said in an interview. “But I think the award is for the Web as a project, and the massive international collaborative spirit of all that have joined me to help.”
The honour comes with a $1 million (R13.52m) prize funded by Google, one of many companies that made a fortune as a result of Berners-Lee’s efforts to make the internet more accessible. He managed that largely by figuring out a simple way to post documents, pictures and videos – everything, really, beyond plain text – online.
Starting in 1989, Berners-Lee began working on ways digital objects could be identified and retrieved through browser software capable of rendering graphics and other images. In August 1991, he launched the world’s first website.
Besides coming up with the web’s technical specifications, Berners-Lee “offered a coherent vision of how each of these elements would work together as part of an integrated whole,” said Vicki Hanson, president of the Association for Computing Machinery.
In an even more significant move, Berners-Lee decided against patenting his technology and instead offered it as royalty-free software. That allowed other programmers to build upon the foundation he’d laid, spawning more than a billion websites today that have helped lure more than 3 billion people online.
The web’s widespread appeal gratifies Berners-Lee, who now splits his time shuttling between the US and Britain as a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Oxford. – AP