Computer boffin extraordinaire Tim Berners-Lee - dubbed the father of the World Wide Web - was awarded a knighthood today for services to the Internet. 

He invented the information superhighway known as the Web, which allows anyone with a computer and browser to use the Internet, and famously created it in his spare time and gave it away for free. 

The modest, publicity-shy physicist, now 48, is at pains to point out that he did not invent the Internet itself and insists he is 'quite an ordinary person'. But without his creation - which spawned billions of web pages used by hundreds of millions of people - there would be no www computer addresses and the Internet might still be the exclusive domain of a handful of computer experts. 

Sir Tim said: "I'm very honoured, although it still feels strange. "I feel like quite an ordinary person and so the good news is that it does happen to ordinary people who work on things that happen to work out, like the Web. "To a certain extent it's an acknowledgement of the profession as well, that it's useful and creditable and not a passing trend. "There was a time when people felt the Internet was another world, but now people realise it's a tool that we use in this world." 

Sir Tim was born in East Sheen, south west London, in 1955, the eldest child of two mathematicians renowned within the computer industry for their work on Britain's first commercial computer, the Ferranti Mark I. He studied at the Emanuel School in Wandsworth and went on to read physics at Queen's College, Oxford, where he was banned from using the university's computer when he and a friend were caught hacking. The student's response was to build his own computer, using an old TV set, a Motorola microprocessor and a soldering iron, all funded by his job in a sawmill.

After graduating with a first in 1976, he spent several years in Dorset, working for Plessey Telecommunications Ltd in Poole and D.G. Nash Ltd in Ferndown before heading for Switzerland. He wrote the program which would later become the Web for his own private use while working at the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, near Geneva. It initially received a luke-warm reception - one of his superiors wrote it was 'vague but exciting' - but Sir Tim went on to write the first web browser and web server, both of which he gave away on the Internet in 1991, and the Web was born. 

While other Internet pioneers went on to become multi-millionaires, he insisted that his creation should be free and globally available, and has fought to ensure the Web was never privately owned. He now earns a modest academic salary as the head of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, where he is now based. 

Sir Tim married Nancy Carlson, an American software analyst, in 1990, although he is still a British citizen, and they have two children. He was previously awarded an OBE and was hailed by Time magazine as one of the top 20 thinkers of the 20th Century.

He was today awarded a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE) on the diplomatic list for services to the global development of the Internet.

He said: "It's a great honour. It's a link to Britain for me, which is nice."

Sir Tim said he was notified of the honour a few days ago via the telephone, and not through the Internet or e-mail. And he said that it never occurred to him that his creation could lead to him receiving a knighthood. 

He said: "We never really had time to sit back and wonder. "So many things could have gone wrong that it might never have taken off, so we just spent all our time explaining how it could work, and persuading people that it would work."