Congratulations to Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the world wide web, who has just been awarded the Order Of Merit - an honour that is in the personal gift of the Queen and can only be held by 24 people at any one time.
If it weren't for Sir Tim, I wouldn't be writing this and you wouldn't be reading it!
His creation and early development of the world wide web has changed our world irrevocably, and few of us would care to go back to a time in which it didn't exist.
Having spent some years researching and producing for television, it's hard to imagine how the job could possibly have been done without e-mail, Google, and the plethora of information available online today.
To be able to ring a complete stranger on the other side of the Atlantic - someone whose existence you only discovered by accident on the web - and follow up the call with an instant-email and perhaps a picture or a document is a way of working that we owe directly to Sir Tim Berners-Lee, OM.
The alternative - now a mere memory, and unthinkable - would be hours in reference libraries with out-of-date, dusty books, prohibitively expensive calls to International Directory Enquiries, and a world far less well-informed than we are today.
Without Sir Tim, there'd be no YouTube, no Google, no iTunes, no MySpace, no Yahoo, no MSN, no eBay, no Amazon, no Wikipedia, no Hotmail, and very few of the things that we now regard as essential ingredients of 21st Century life.
When you consider that previous holders of the Order Of Merit included Thomas Hardy, you begin to realise just how important Sir Tim really is.
I, for one, will be eternally grateful to him - a man who has done more to merit his Order of Merit than any man alive.
Jon McKnight
Author of Sort The Bastards!
