Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Robert Kahn, Vinton Cerf, Louis Pouzin and Marc Andreessen will share the £1m award. The citation panel said the five men had all contributed to the revolution in communications that has taken place in recent decades.
The UK government initiated the QE Prize as a companion to the Nobels to raise the profile of engineering. It is endowed by industry and administered by an independent trust chaired by Lord Browne, a former chief executive of BP. The award was announced at the Royal Academy of Engineering in central London. Sir Tim may be the best known of the winners, certainly in the UK. Working with others in the late 1980s, he helped develop the world wide web, which radically simplified the way information could be shared on the net.
Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf provided the engineering insights that actually made the internet work. Their TCP/IP protocols define the way data travels around the internet. Louis Pouzin helped work out how data should be labelled so that it reached the right destination. Marc Andreessen is the man who developed Mosaic, the first popular browser for the web.