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Tim Berners-Lee awarded the British Order of Merit
MarsBar writes "The BBC is reporting that Sir Tim Berners-Lee has been awarded The Order of Merit, a royal award granted directly by the Queen. Previous recipients have included Florence Nightingale, Sir Winston Churchill, Bertrand Russell, Graham Greene, Sir Edward Elgar, Mother Teresa and Margaret Thatcher."
I don't get as excited about Sir Tim as perhaps maybe I should. It was Einer Stefferud who invented MIME which is really at the heart of http, and Brian Reid whose PhD thesis, SCRIBE, begat SGML which begat HTML. Sir Tim just put the bits together which seems to be to be another one of those inevitabilities.
Stef also invented and ran the first mailing list and Brian is also responsible for the firewall, Alta Vista and the laserwriter among many others.
Need Mercedes parts ?
I don't think there's debate about whether Thatcher was good for the economy.
Most debate is centred around whether this outweighs the things it took to achieve it: increased police powers, reduced personal freedoms, CCTV culture, greed culture, privatisation of swathes of industry and transport infrastructure. The iron lady certainly took her toll on cultural britain.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Yeay, I was really surprised to see Thatcher among those nice people!
Ironically, it was IBM who sold the punched-tape based computers to the Nazi party, which helped make the holocaust possible; but they don't refer to that in their company history.
I can hardly say if I'd prefer to share a merit with Bertrand Russell or with sir Edward Elgar. Such great people!
linuxav
I think receiving the Order of Merit is most likely not just because of what he did but how he did it. It's a greater measure of the man that he did this for the good of others (with some personal gain for sure but not strictly for personal gain) and that's why he received an award that only 24 living people on the planet can hold.
That puts him in very high regard and he should be. That said, I knew nothing about him until reading the article. Some people want fame and glory, others just want to do what they do and do it well. Some get both, most get neither.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."