The Inventor of World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee Wins Top Computing Prize

The Association of Computing Machine awarded Tim Berners-Lee, the 2016 A.M. Turing Award on Tuesday for his pioneer work in web. The computer scientist, who invented the World Wide Web less than three decades ago, has won the top computing industry prize often called as “Nobel prize of computing field”, just as his wildly successful invention is challenged by new mobile technology.

Berners-Lee said “I have to accept it on behalf of thousands of people who have helped make web standards and helped protest when net neutrality was threatened.”

He's receiving the award not just for inventing the basics of the web, but designing them in an elegant way. His concepts for links (URLs and URIs) were simple and easy to implement, while making HTML the heart of the web helped anyone publish info in a practical format.

The honor carries a $1 million prize as well as plenty of prestige. It's named for Alan Turing, the UK researcher who helped to crack Germany's Enigma code in World War II and who was instrumental in conceiving the fundamental design of computers.

Presently Berners-Lee is working on an open source project called Solid. He hopes to create an open technology standard that different applications can use to share data, regardless of what that data is or what type of application needs to read it. Such a standard would enable applications—your hospital’s record-keeping software or a social network—to read and write data from the servers you choose and control, rather than the servers that belong to an individual company.

The Queen of England dubbed Tim Berners-Lee, a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire, 13 years ago. Truly Modern commerce, news, cinema, and politics almost certainly wouldn't be the same without him.