Internet Pioneers Pick $1.5 Million Prize

The only reason you can read this on your computer or mobile device is because of the Internet, where five engineers were the ones behind the Internet. Good to know that after all of these years, these engineers were given additional recognition, where they were awarded with a $1.5-million prize that the British organisers hope will eventually be on par with the Nobel Prize when it comes to engineering.

Robert Kahn, Vinton Cerf as well as Marc Andreessen of the US will share in this inaugural £1-million Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering with Louis Pouzin of France and Tim Berners-Lee of Britain. According to Alec Broers, chair of the judging panel, “The emergence of the internet and the web involved many teams of people all over the world. However, these five visionary engineers, never before honoured together as a group, led the key developments that shaped the internet and web as a coherent system and brought them into public use.”

Kahn, Cerf and Pouzin were credited to have made “seminal” contributions to the design and protocols which right now make up the fundamental architecture of the Internet, while Berners-Lee is the one who was credited with “inventing’ the World Wide Web. Better late than never, no?

Edwin Kee
Categories: Computers
Tags: internet