Science News Archive

Knighthood For The Creator of The Internet

The unsung hero of the modern age, Tim Berners-Lee, was named in this year’s new years honours list for his “services to the internet”. Did you know that in 1991, the English Physicist devised the world-wide-web in his spare time while working as a researcher at the European particle research lab in Cern. Crucially, Sir Berners Lee gave his invention away free, rather than trying to patent or restrict it’s use, and this paved the way for the web growing at an incredibly fast rate to be the vast size it is today- and if things had been different the internet might still have been the exclusive domain of a handful of computer experts. Berners Lee has tried to point out though that he didn’t really invent the internet, but just worked out a method for more easily accessing what was there.

4th Jan 2004