Inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, has received the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) most prestigious honour, the A.M. Turing Award.

The Turing Award is an annual award given out by the ACM which recognises individuals who have made a significant technical contribution to computing.

Berners-Lee is being recognised for, “inventing the World Wide Web, the first web browser, and the fundamental protocols and algorithms allowing the web to scale,” said the ACM.

Berners-Lee’s prize marks the 50th anniversary of the award which comes with a prize of $1 million, provided by Google.

“I’m humbled to receive the namesake award of a computing pioneer who showed that what a programmer could do with a computer is limited only by the programmer themselves,” Berners-Lee said. “It is an honour to receive an award like the Turing that has been bestowed to some of the most brilliant minds in the world.”

In 1989, Berners-Lee came up with the idea of the World Wide Web while working with the European Organisation for Nuclear Research – CERN to create an online collaborative space for staff.

He had developed the first website with CERN in 1991, which went live on August 6 of the same year.

In 1994, with the Web beginning to transform into a global success, Berners-Lee joined the computer science department and founded the World Wide Web Consortium at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

In 2016, he moved to Oxford University, where he became a professor in the computer science department, although he remains involved with MIT.

The Turing Award comes as yet another accolade in his distinguished career. In 2004, he was knighted by the Queen, before being awarded the Order of Merit in 2007.

Berners-Lee is currently working on a number of projects, including the Decentralised Information Group, of which he is co-director, which aims to remove the filter bubbles people create for themselves using social media.

He is also President of the Open Data Institute, a body which aims to give people greater control over their data.