Sir Tim Berners Lee, deservingly among the most decorated of technology professionals for his invention of the world wide web, has now been honored with the 50th edition of the ACM A.M. Turing Award (a.k.a., the Nobel Prize of Computing).
The MIT and University of Oxford professor is being recognized with the $1M Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) prize, funded by Google, for inventing the web, coming up with the first browser and working on the protocols and algorithms that have allowed the web to scale.
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“The first-ever World Wide Web site went online in 1991,” said ACM President Vicki L. Hanson, in a statement. “Although this doesn’t seem that long ago, it is hard to imagine the world before Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s invention. 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.”
Berners-Lee, who serves as director of the World Wide Web Consortium that he established in 1994, continues to fight the good fight for his invention some 28 years after its birth, too, recently citing three big concerns that threaten the web's potential to serve humanity to its fullest.
Berners-Lee's accomplishments have been recognized many times over the years. Among his accolades: 2012 Internet Hall of Fame induction; 2002 Japan Prize; 2006 President's Medal, 2002 Marconi Prize, 2004 Millennium Technology Prize.
Last year's Turing Award went to the crypto dream team of Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman.
The ACM has announced it will celebrate 50 years of the A.M. Turing Award with a (tech) star-studded conference in San Francisco this summer. The two-day event, to be held June 23-24, will "explore how computing has evolved and where the field is headed," according to the ACM.
MORE: Why there's no official Nobel Prize in Computing
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