9:24pm UK, Friday July 16, 2004

The inventor of the world wide web has been knighted by the Queen.         

Computer use was revolutionised when Sir Tim Berners-Lee created the famous www address code.

180 Tim Berners-Lee

Sir Tim Berners-Lee

Speaking after meeting the Queen, Sir Tim said he had not been made aware as to whether the Royal Family are web surfers.     

He said: "I think the family are pretty knowledgeable about it. I've met the Duke before and he was well aware of the history of IT."      

He added: "The web must remain a universal medium open to all and not biasing the information it conveys."        

Sir Tim created the web in his spare time and gave it away so that it could never be privately owned.         

He is among the top 20 Time magazine list of 20th century thinkers.      

Born in East Sheen, south-west London, in 1955, he was the eldest child of two mathematicians renowned within the computer industry for their work on Britain's first commercial computer, the Ferranti Mark I.         

He studied at the Emanuel School in Wandsworth and later read physics at the Queen's College, Oxford, where he was banned from using the university's computer after being caught hacking.         

Sir Tim later built his own computer, using an old TV set, a Motorola microprocessor and a soldering iron.         

He created the programme which later became the web for his own private use while working at the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, near Geneva, then went on to write the first web browser and web server, both of which he gave away on the internet in 1991.         

The married father of two, who lives in America, now works as the head of the World Wide Web Consortium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston.         

Sir Tim, who was previously awarded an OBE, collected his gong for "services to the global development of the internet" from Buckingham Palace.