Queen Elizabeth honors Marc Andreessen, others with engineering prize
The first QEPrize will go to Andreessen along with Louis Pouzin, Robert Kahn, Vinton Cert, and Tim Berners-Lee for ground-breaking work that led to the Internet and World Wide Web.
Queen Elizabeth has honored five engineers who created the Internet and World Wide Web in her first Prize for Engineering.
Louis Pouzin, Robert Kahn, Vint Cerf, Tim Berners-Lee, and Marc Andreessen will share an award of 1 million pounds. They are credited for helping spawn the Internet, (Sorry, Al Gore. You didn't quite make the cut.), which the prize site said is "an engineering achievement that has changed the direction of the world."
"The Internet and WWW led to a communications revolution of unprecedented power and impact," the site said.
Pouzin, Kahn, and Cerf made contributions to the protocols (or standards) that together make up the fundamental architecture of the Internet, the prize award said, while Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web, which vastly extended the use of the Internet beyond e-mail and file transfer.
Andreessen, meanwhile, wrote the Mosaic browser that was widely distributed and that made the Web accessible to everyone. His work triggered a huge number of applications unimagined by the early network pioneers, the prize said.
The Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering was started to recognize and celebrate "outstanding advances in engineering that have changed the world." Queen Elizabeth will present the award this summer.