_____________________________________________________________________________ _ _ __ __ _ ___ \\\\\___| |_| | \ \ / / / \ | __|___\"-._ /////~~~| _ | \ / / _ \ __ ~~~/.-' |_| |_| \/\/ /_/ \_\ |___| _____________________________________________________________________________ THE HANK WILLIAMS APPRECIATION SOCIETY INTERNATIONAL 1978 _____________________________________________________________________________ HWAS SALUTES SIR TIMOTHY BERNERS-LEE ____________________________________________________________________________ Knighthood for 'father of the Web' ____________________________________________________________________________ Wednesday, December 31, 2003 Posted: 1608 GMT (12:08 AM HKT) Berners-Lee believed the Internet should be free for everyone. LONDON, England (CNN) -- The computer wizard dubbed the "father of the World Wide Web" is to receive a knighthood for services to the Internet. Tim Berners-Lee invented the information superhighway known as the Web, which allows anyone with a computer and browser to use the Internet. Famously, he created it in his spare time, and gave it away for free. The England rugby team and rock star Eric Clapton were among others named in the New Year's honors list on Wednesday. (Sports, music stars honored) Berners-Lee is to become a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE) on the diplomatic list for services to the global development of the Internet. As a British citizen, Berners-Lee will be able to use the title "Sir Tim." The modest, publicity-shy physicist, now 48 and based in the U.S., is at pains to point out that he did not invent the Internet itself and insists he is "quite an ordinary person." But without his creation -- which spawned billions of web pages used by hundreds of millions of computer users -- there would be no www computer addresses and the Internet might still be the exclusive domain of a handful of computer experts. Berners-Lee told the UK's Press Association: "I'm very honored, although it still feels strange. "I feel like quite an ordinary person and so the good news is that it does happen to ordinary people who work on things that happen to work out, like the Web. "To a certain extent it's an acknowledgement of the profession as well, that it's useful and creditable and not a passing trend. "There was a time when people felt the Internet was another world, but now people realize it's a tool that we use in this world." Berners-Lee was born in East Sheen, south west London, in 1955, the eldest child of two mathematicians renowned within the computer industry for their work on Britain's first commercial computer, the Ferranti Mark I. He studied at the Emanuel School in Wandsworth and went on to read physics at Queen's College, Oxford, where he was banned from using the university's computer when he and a friend were caught hacking. The student's response was to build his own computer, using an old TV set, a Motorola microprocessor and a soldering iron, all funded by his job in a sawmill. After graduating with a first-class degree in 1976, he spent several years in Dorset, working for Plessey Telecommunications in Poole, southern England, and D.G. Nash Ltd in nearby Ferndown before heading for Switzerland. He wrote the program which would later become the Web for his own private use while working at the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, near Geneva in 1991. It initially received a luke-warm reception -- one of his superiors wrote it was "vague but exciting" -- but Sir Tim went on to write the first Web browser and Web server, both of which he gave away on the Internet in 1991, and the Web was born. While other Internet pioneers went on to become multi-millionaires, he insisted that his creation should be free and globally available, and has fought to ensure the Web was never privately owned. He is now head of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston. He married Nancy Carlson, an American software analyst, in 1990, and they have two children. He was previously awarded an OBE and was hailed by Time magazine as one of the top 20 thinkers of the 20th Century. He said: "It's a great honor. "It's a link to Britain for me, which is nice. Links with Britain are very important to me. "You always see Buckingham Palace through the railings. It's about as much of a shock to go through the railings as it is to go through the mirror like Alice in Wonderland. "You always assume that life as you know it stops at the railings of Buckingham Palace." Berners-Lee said that living in America meant he was unaware of the recent controversy in Britain surrounding the system of awarding honors. (Poet in royal honor protest) He said: "What's interesting about the British system is the way that modern values of democracy and transparency have been connected with ancient tradition, and attempts to keep that tradition and its roots alive. "It's a good idea to review the process by which you make decisions but not to change them too dramatically, but incrementally." Berners-Lee told PA he was notified of the honor a few days ago via the telephone, and not through the Internet or e-mail. He added that it never occurred to him that his creation could lead to him receiving a knighthood. He said: "We never really had time to sit back and wonder. So many things could have gone wrong that it might never have taken off, so we just spent all our time explaining how it could work, and persuading people that it would work." ____________________________________________________________________________ EXCERPTED FROM: http://edition.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/europe/12/31/britain.honors.webman/ ____________________________________________________________________________ UPDATE: June 16, 2004 ____________________________________________________________________________ British creator of World Wide Web scoops first technology 'Nobel prize' ____________________________________________________________________________ [The Scotsman] Wed 16 Jun 2004 URL: http://news.scotsman.com/scitech.cfm?id=683262004 ____________________________________________________________________________ RHIANNON EDWARD SIR Tim Berners-Lee, credited with inventing the World Wide Web, has avoided both the spotlight and the riches won by many internet entrepreneurs. But yesterday he received the first Millennium Technology Prize - a £663,000 cash award recognising his revolutionary contribution to humanity’s ability to communicate. The award, presented by Finland’s president, Tarja Halonen, is among the largest of its kind. It was established in 2002 along the lines of the Nobel prizes and is backed by the Finnish government. "Building the web, I didn’t do it all myself. The really exciting thing about it is that it was done by lots and lots of people, connected with this tremendous spirit," Sir Tim, 49, said at the award ceremony in Helsinki. The prize committee outlined the award to be given for "an outstanding innovation that directly promotes people’s quality of life, is based on humane values and encourages sustainable economic development". Sir Tim is recognised as the creator of the internet while working in the early 1990s for the CERN Laboratory, the European centre for nuclear research near Geneva, Switzerland. His graphical point-and-click browser, "WorldWideWeb", was the first client that featured the core ideas included in today’s web browsers - Internet Explorer, Netscape, Opera and Mozilla among them. In developing the browsing concept, he fleshed out the core communication protocols needed for transmitting web pages from servers to users, the HTTP, or hypertext transfer protocol, and HTML, the so-called markup language used to create them. The prize committee underlined the importance of Sir Tim’s decision to never strive to commercialise or patent his contributions to the internet technologies he has developed. Sir Tim says he would never have succeeded, if he had been asking for money for his inventions. "If I had tried to demand fees, there would be no World Wide Web, there would be lots of small webs," he said. He also remains modest about his achievements. "I was just taking lots of things that already existed and added a little bit," he said. But Pekka Tarjanne, chairman of the prize committee, said: "No-one doubts who the father of the WWW is, except Sir Tim himself." During the 15 years since he began working on the WWW idea, Sir Tim’s inventions have undergone rapid changes, but the underlying technology remains the same. Knighted in December, he continues to work at the standard-setting World Wide Web Consortium at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in the United States. His recent project - which experts say is potentially as revolutionary as the web itself - is called the semantic web. Very technical in nature, it is an attempt to bring an agreement on how information is stored on the internet and to organise the jungle of data found on the net into a "web" of concepts. "It is an exciting new development that we’re making, " he said. The goal of the global database is to allow computers to use a form of intelligent reasoning about concepts and ideas in documents to sort out relevant information. This would, in turn, make it much easier for users to find only what they want to find, and nothing else. In his acceptance speech, Sir Tim focused on technology as an evolving process that was just in its infancy. "All sorts of things, too long for me to list here, are still out there waiting to be done. There are so many new things to make, limited only by our imagination," he said. The millennium award will be granted every two years, and the Finnish government has agreed to supply the prize money. ____________________________________________________________________________ Reprinted under the Fair Use http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html Doctrine of International Copyright Law ____________________________________________________________________________ Note: Join Robert Ackerman's Hank Fan Mailing list. _____________________________________________________________________________ Email: Hank1@mtaonline.net _____________________________________________________________________________