Five Internet Founders Share First £1 Million Engineering 'Nobel' Prize

judgecorp writes "The first Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, worth £1 million, has been shared by five founders of the Internet and the World Wide Web. In addition to Sir Tim Berners Lee and Vint Cerf, the other recipients are Cerf's colleague Bob Kahn, creator of the Mosaic browser Marc Andreessen, and a much less well known Frenchman, Louis Pouzin, aged 82. Working at Bell Labs, Pouzin invented the datagram protocols on which Cerf and Kahn based the TCP/IP protocols. The judges originally planned the prize for a maximum of three winners, but that had to change, thanks to the collaborative nature of the Internet. All the recipients praised their colleagues and pointed out that engineering is always a team effort: 'Fortunately we are still alive,' joked Pouzin. 'It is forty years since we did the things for which we are being honoured.' Awarded in the U.K., the prize is an international effort to create an engineering counterpart to the Nobels. The judges considered entries from 65 countries."

Re:Purely a publicity stunt

[JaredOfEuropa]

If I were them I'd stay away from VCs, who'll want far too big a say in the venture in exchange for their funding. In contrast, getting 200k quid in the right hands with no strings attached could do a hell of a lot more for innovation. But perhaps they'll spend their share on hookers and blow, which is fine as well.

The point of this prize is not to further science or innovation, but to promote engineering by celebrating notable engineering achievements and contributors to those achievements. Seems like a worthy undertaking to me. I just wished not every sciency non-Nobel prize would be referred to as the "Nobel prize for xyz"