Internet pioneers awarded Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering

THE FIRST Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering has been awarded to five people that were essential to the creation of the internet, who will split a £1m award.

Amongst the winners was Sir Tim Berners-Lee, recognised as the inventor as the World Wide Web, and Marc Andreessen, the co-author of Mosaic - the world's first web browser.

Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf, developers of the TCP and IP protocols, will also take slices of the £1m, as will Louis Pouzin, who greatly influenced Kahn's and Cerf's work.

The judging panel, which included professor Brian Cox and VMWare founder Dianne Green, highlighted that the five winners' work "revolutionised the way we communicate and enabled the development of whole new industries".

A spokesperson for the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering said, "Today a third of the world's population use the Internet and it is estimated to carry around 330 Petabytes of data per year, enough to transfer every character ever written in every book ever published 20 times over."

"The winners are Robert Kahn, Vinton Cerf and Louis Pouzin for their contributions to the protocols that make up the fundamental architecture of the Internet, Tim Berners-Lee who created the World Wide Web and Marc Andreessen who wrote the Mosaic browser."

Sir Tim Berners-Lee is understandably please with the award, thanking coders and standards geeks on Twitter.

Very honoured w Louis, Vint, Bob & Marc be awarded 1st #QEPrize for #engineering -- credit to coders, standards geeks @w3c

— Tim Berners-Lee (@timberners_lee) March 18, 2013

Andreessen has come out to say he'll donate his piece of the prize to worthy causes, which is not much of a surprise given that he is a multi-millionaire.

The five winners will be presented with the prize by Queen Elizabeth II in London this June. µ