Berners-Lee , at Emanuel from 1969 to 1973 and inventor of the World Wide Web, has been awarded fellowship of the Royal Society , the country's highest scientific honour. Now based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US, he invented the World Wide Web in 1990 while working at CERN, the European laboratory for Particle Physics. He also designed the universal resource locator, or URL, which gives each web page a unique address, and HTML, the basic language that allows web pages to be created. Professor Berners-Lee is among 43 fellows whose election to the Royal Society is announced today.
Some commentators claim that the honour is long overdue.