Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of world wide web has been awarded with the 2016 Turing Award. The Turing Award is of a very high stature and is often termed as Nobel Prize for the computing industry. The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) holds the responsibility of presenting it annually to someone with “major contributions of lasting importance to computing.” The award has been named in the honor of British mathematician and scientist Alan Turing and is sponsored by Google, which offers a $1 million prize to the winners.
Berners-Lee is British by origin, and attained knighthood in 2003. His works revolutionized the web starting in 1989 while he worked at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. He started off with the aim of providing scientists all around the world a way to share information. He is credited for the creation of a naming program- URLs, a communication scheme- HTTP, and a coding language for webpages – HTML. Apart from this, he also coded the world’s first browser through open-source, which laid the foundation to browsers like Mosaic.
In a statement ACM President Vicki L. Hanson said;
The first-ever World Wide Web site went online in 1991. Although this doesn’t seem that long ago, it is hard to imagine the world before Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s invention.
He added;
In many ways, the colossal impact of the World Wide Web is obvious. Many people, however, may not fully appreciate the underlying technical contributions that make the Web possible. Sir Tim Berners-Lee not only developed the key components, such as URIs and web browsers that allow us to use the Web, but offered a coherent vision of how each of these elements would work together as part of an integrated whole.
Tim Berners-Lee, who is credited for the foundation of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the World Wide Web Foundation, will be presented with the award on June 24 at the ACM’s annual banquet in San Francisco. Berners-Lee is presently serving MIT as a senior researcher and holds the founders chair at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).
Speaking about the award, he said:
I’m humbled to receive the namesake award of a computing pioneer who showed that what a programmer could do with a computer is limited only by the programmer themselves.
The culture of awarding the Turning Award began in 1966, and some of its early recipients include Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, who are better known as the ‘Fathers of the Internet’ for the invention of the TCP/IP protocol.
