Tim Berners-Lee, the founding father of the World Wide Web, has been recognised with the Order of Merit from the Queen.

The award, which is in the Queen's personal gift, is one of the highest honours available and reflects the huge impact of Berners-Lee's work.

Berners-Lee built his first computer from scratch in 1976 while at Oxford. The components included an old television.

In 1980 he wrote a program called Enquire during a short placement at Cern that would become the template for the World Wide Web, although this was never published.

In 1989 he proposed a global hypertext project that would become the template for what we now take for granted as the web.

His idea was to form a matrix of interlinked documents and his first viewer was a browser, as we'd now call it, known as Worldwideweb.

Its publication in 1991 to the internet at large allowed the rest of the world to refine and develop the basic template he had outlined.

Berners-Lee was knighted in 2004.