Goresville- And we always thought it was Al Gore who invented the Internet.

In any event, Tim Berners-Lee, the physicist who invented the world wide web, has been awarded a knighthood.

Berners-Lee is named in today’s New Year’s Honors List for “services to the internet” – creating the system that has revolutionized computer use across the globe.

The system, which he devised in his spare time in 1991 while working as a researcher at the European particle research laboratory Cern, features billions of web pages used by hundreds of millions of people every day.

Berners-Lee, who is the head of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, gave his invention away rather than trying to patent or restrict its use, making it possible for the web to grow at a rate never seen. Without his creation, there would be no “www” computer addresses, and the internet might still be the exclusive domain of a handful of computer experts.