On March 18, amid great hoopla, the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering was awarded to Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Robert Kahn, Vinton Cerf, Louis Pouzin and Marc Andreessen.
The 15-person selection panel said the five men had all contributed to the recent revolution in communications that has taken place in recent decades. Which is manifestly true. But the fine distinctions between the contribution each made escaped BBC News, which treated them all as inventors of the Internet.
The truth is more complicated: Cerf, Kahn and Pouzin can legitimately get most of the credit for designing the network; Berners-Lee built the Web on the foundations laid by them; and Marc Andreessen (with his colleague Eric Bina, who is strangely omitted from the prize list) in turn built on Berners-Lee's work by creating the first major Web browser.