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Sir Tim of the World Wide Web

Tim Berners-Lee, known as the "Father of the World Wide Web", is receiving a knighthood, as announced by Buckingham Palace as part of Britain's 2004 New Year's Honours list.

Laying the groundwork in the early 1980s, Berners-Lee proposed development of the World Wide Web in 1989 while at the CERN Particle Physics Laboratory in Switzerland. He wrote the first WWW client and the first WWW server along with most of the communications software, defining the URL, HTTP and HTML protocols.

London-born Berners-Lee graduated from Oxford University in 1976, and is currently a senior research scientist at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science and Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

Ironically, the news of his knighthood was given to Berners-Lee by telephone, and not by email.

Happy New Year, Sir Tim!