The first Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering to five men whose work was fundamental in creating the World Wide Web.
Engineers Robert Kahn, Vinton Cerf, Louis Pouzin, Tim Berners-Lee and Marc Andreessen were today announced as the winners by Lord Browne of Madingley in the presence of HRH The Princess Royal at the Royal Academy of Engineering, which administers the prize.
The winners will come to London in June for the formal presentation of the £1m prize by Her Majesty The Queen.
"These five visionary engineers, never before honoured together as a group, led the key developments that shaped the Internet and Web as a coherent system and brought them into public use," said Lord Broers, chair of the judging panel for the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering.
"Engineering is, by its very nature, a collaborative activity and the emergence of the Internet and the Web involved many teams of people all over the world," said Lord Broers.
ARPAnet
The Internet built on, but significantly extended, the work done on the ARPAnet in the 1960s.
Bob Kahn, Vint Cerf and Louis Pouzin made seminal contributions to the design and protocols that together make up the fundamental architecture at the heart of the Internet.
It was Tim Berners-Lee's invention of the World Wide Web - an information-sharing model that is built on top of the Internet - that allows us to use it in the way we do today.
Mosaic browser
Marc Andreessen wrote the Mosaic browser.
The citation also noted that these five engineers showed foresight in sharing their work freely and without restriction.
