By Ben King, 21 August 2001 18:10
NEWS 'Father of the web' Tim Berners-Lee has received an award for his services to engineering. The new plaudit is the Whittle medal, named after Sir Frank Whittle, who is credited as the father of the jet engine. Berners-Lee cooked up many of the elements that we now know as the world wide web while working at the CERN particle accelerator in Geneva, Switzerland. He developed a system for people to collaborate and share information with their fellow researchers, giving birth to many key internet acronyms, such as HyperText Markup Language (HTML), Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and Universal Resource Locator (URL). His inventions spread and in 1993 he founded the World Wide Web Consortium to assist the development of the web as it began to grow. The Whittle medal is awarded by the Royal Academy of Engineering and Berners-Lee is the first person ever to receive it. In May, Berners-Lee was made a Fellow of the Royal Society, one of the most prestigious honours in British Science. To watch silicon.com's exclusive interview with the man himself, originally published last September, visit: www.silicon.com/a39730
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