Sir Tim Berners-Lee Will Receive ACM A.M. Turing Award

The inventor of the World Wide Web was the opening general session speaker at NACStech 2007.

April 06, 2017

NEW YORK CITY – The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has named Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web and director of the World Wide Web Consortium, as the recipient of the 2016 ACM A.M. Turing Award. The ACM Turing Award is recognized as the highest distinction in computer science and is sometimes referred to as the Nobel Prize of Computing. The award is named for the British Computer Scientist Alan Turing, the key founder of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence and developer of the Turing machine, considered a model of a general purpose computer.

Berners-Lee is being honored for inventing the World Wide Web, the first web browser, and the fundamental protocols and algorithms allowing the Web to scale. Considered one of the most influential computing innovations in history, the World Wide Web is the technical infrastructure of society and has already become the universal connectivity platform.

“It is an honor to receive the Turing Award and to be included in such extraordinary company with the other winners. I’m also humbled to be connected to Alan Turing. My parents, who worked on the Manchester/Ferranti Mark I, knew Turing when they were at Manchester. He changed everything: By pointing out that computers are all equivalent, he threw down the gauntlet to all who programmed them; what was possible with computers is limited only by our imaginations,” Berners-Lee said in a press release.

A decade ago, Berners-Lee spoke at the Opening General Session during NACStech 2007 in Nashville, Tenn. “One would be hard-pressed to find any innovation that has affected the world as quickly and to the extent that the World Wide Web has,” said NACStech 2007 Conference Chair Patrick Lewis, who is also partner and CEO of Oasis Stop ’N Go Convenience Stores, in a press release about the event. “Berners-Lee’s invention has taken the world in an exciting direction.”

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