Prize awarded to inventors of internet

Internet pioneers Robert Kahn (centre) and Louis Pouzin (right) attended the award ceremony
Source: Royal Academy of Engineering

The first Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, which comes with a prize fund of one million pounds, has been awarded to internet pioneers Tim Berners-Lee, Robert Kahn, Vinton Cerf, Marc Andreessen and Louis Pouzin. According to the Royal Academy of Engineering , the distinguished engineers made significant contributions to the development of the internet: Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, Cerf and Kahn developed the TCP/IP protocol, Andreessen wrote the browser Mosaic and founded Netscape and Pouzin developed CYCLADES, a predecessor to TCP/IP.

The Royal Academy of Engineering hopes that its Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, funded by several large companies, will become a kind of Nobel Prize for engineers, with a prize awarded every two years. The winners were announced in March with the actual award ceremony taking place this month. At the award ceremony, Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, warned against letting governments and corporations have too much control over the internet saying "When you make something universal...it can be used for good things or nasty things...we just have to make sure it's not undercut by any large companies or governments trying to use it and get total control".

(fab)