Top 10 Great Britons in IT history

2. Alan Turing
Shaun Nichols: The life story of Alan Turing is truly one of the most inspiring and tragic of the 20th century. To this day it elicits a mixture of pride and regret among the technology community. Few people have contributed so much to society and been treated so harshly in return.

Working under immense pressure and exhausting conditions at Bletchley Park's Hut 8 facility, Turing and his team worked night and day to break the German Enigma code cipher. Doing so helped the Allies gain the upper hand in the war, and is likely to have saved tens or even hundreds of thousands of lives.

After the war, Turing continued his work in the field and helped to develop what would be known as the first computer capable of executing stored programs.

Tragically, Turning was later prosecuted as a homosexual and eventually committed suicide. What is perhaps even more tragic, is that it took 55 years before the government finally recognised how shameful the treatment of Turing was and issue an official apology to the man.

Iain Thomson: The British apology, and the news that surviving members of Bletchley will be recognised was too little too late for many of the veterans who worked there. I've got my doubts about the sincerity of the gesture, especially considering Bletchley's current money troubles.

Turing was one of those rare geniuses who could seemingly master anything. While he's best known in the computing sphere he also did advanced work in physics, chemistry and biology. But computing was his focus for many years and it's fair to say that he was a lynch-pin in the development of the modern computer and the software needed to run it.

He was years ahead of his time, writing a computer chess program that lacked a computer powerful enough to run it. He ran it anyway in 1952 by playing the role of the computer and reportedly beat a human opponent. His ideas are still affecting research into artificial intelligence (AI) today, and his idea of training computers rather than trying to program a fully functional AI system shows promise.

That it took so long for Turing's work to be recognised says a lot about Cold War paranoia and social attitudes, but now his country of birth has finally recognised what a great talent we lost.

1. Sir Tim Berners-Lee
Shaun Nichols: Seeing as how we wouldn't be able to write this article, nor would you be able to read it, had it not been for Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the top spot here was a no-brainer.

Berners-Lee was working as a programmer at CERN when he embarked on a project to standardise the transmission and storage of data between networked systems. What he eventually came up with was a system known as the Hypertext Transport Protocol, better known as HTTP. This deservedly earned Berners-Lee a slew of awards and proper recognition as the father of the World Wide Web.

But the man wasn't without his errors. Most notably, Berners-Lee was critical of the idea of adding images to the web's text content. He even went as far as to express his displeasure with the idea to the young punk behind the project, one Marc Andreessen. Fortunately, Sir Tim lost out and the creation of the web browser went forward.

Berners-Lee also confessed to another gaffe earlier this year when he admitted that the // characters in the URL were unnecessary and had likely wasted a good amount of ink and energy.

Still, that whole creating the web thing kind of trumps those other mistakes, don't you think?

Iain Thomson: I always get angry when we get letters complaining that the Large Hadron Collider and CERN are a waste of money. The irony of people complaining online when a CERN employee literally gave away the World Wide Web seems to escape them. There's a reason why you let geeks do pure research: it allows them to develop all sorts of accidental spin-offs.

We forget how many vital inventions were discovered by accident. The electron was discovered 20 years before it was ever used, x-rays and penicillin were both accidental discoveries and the web definitely was.

Berners-Lee was simply trying to develop a system for sharing information between CERN researchers. So he built a system to link documents over the internet communications system and share them with anyone else.

"I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the Transmission Control Protocol and domain name system ideas and - ta-da! - the World Wide Web, " as he said.

CERN then promptly gave away all the underlying technology behind the TCP/IP protocol and the modern internet was born. Everything you see and do online is down to this man.

Even though Berners-Lee received no direct compensation for giving away the most important invention of his generation, he's done all right since then as the prizes and plaudits have rolled in. He continues to w ork in the field and is a strong proponent of net neutrality and data privacy.