The Queen’s greatest contribution to technological innovation lies in the various honours she bestowed on leaders in technology – her own knights of the technology table. Image: Reuters.
By Professor Louis Fourie
Queen Elizabeth II embraced technology over her long reign of 70 years.
When she delivered her Christmas message in 1957, she was the first British monarch to use television in her Christmas broadcast.
In 1997 Buckingham Palace established a website and later started using social media, such as an official You Tube channel in 2007, Twitter in 2009, and Instagram in 2013.
Unlike former president Trump, a prolific Tweeter, it is doubtful whether the Queen ever in her personal capacity sent a Tweet or uploaded any media to You Tube or Instagram.
However, the Queen’s greatest contribution to technological innovation lies in the various honours she bestowed on leaders in technology – her own knights of the technology table.
To commemorate her prodigious contribution to technology it is worthwhile to take a look at a few of the long list of renowned technologists she has honoured.
Clive Sinclair (30 July 1940 – 16 September 2021)
Sinclair left school at 18 to sell miniature electronics kits to hobbyists via mail-order. In 1961 he started Sinclair Radionics Ltd, which produced the world’s first slimline, electronic pocket calculator called the Sinclair Executive in 1972.
In 1980 Sinclair founded Sinclair Research Ltd and moved into the production of home computers and produced the famous ZX80, the first mass-market home computer in the UK for less than a £100.
The ZX80 was followed in the 1980s by the ZX81, ZX Spectrum, and the Sinclair QL. The affordable ZX81 eventually became a popular brand in the UK and US, especially among so-called “bedroom coders,” and contributed to the rise of the UK’s video game industry.
Sinclair is thus widely recognised for the major role he played in the early days of the British and European home computer industry, as well as the British video game industry.
In 1983 he was appointed Knight Bachelor by Queen Elizabeth II for his contributions to the personal computer industry in the UK.
Tim Berners-Lee (8 June 1955 - )
Tim Berners-Lee is the remarkable person who conceived the World Wide Web. While working as a contractor at The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland from June to December 1980, he proposed a new system, based on the concept of hypertext, to make sharing and updating of information among the lab’s researchers easier.
The prototype system was originally called Enquire. The next three years Berners-Lee worked at Image Computer Systems in Dorset, England, where he developed a “real-time remote procedure call.”
In 1984 he returned to CERN as a fellow and used his experience in computer networking to link various existing individual elements together: hypertext, the internet, and multi-font text objects.
Together with Robert Cailliau he built a new system based on the initial Enquire system. Thus the first web browser was created and the first website was launched on 20 December 1990.
When creating the World Wide Web, Berners-Lee created the fastest growing communications medium of all time. It has changed the shape of modern life forever.
To honour these remarkable achievements, Berners-Lee was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2004 and appointed to the prestigious Order of Merit in 2007 – an order restricted to 24 living members.
In 2013 he was awarded the inaugural Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering for his work in creating the World Wide Web.
Bill Gates (28 October 1955 - )
One of the greatest pioneers of the microcomputer during the 1970s and 1980s was the well-known Bill Gates. Bill Gates notably wrote his first software program at the young age of 13.
Later he enrolled at Harvard University with an incredible 1 590 score out of 1 600 on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), but left university after two years to found Microsoft with Paul Allen in 1975. However, it was a contract with IBM to create an operating system for its IBM personal computer that propelled Microsoft into the big leagues.
Gates had foreseen the rise of IBM clones, and Microsoft’s MS-DOS was soon the main operating system for that market. Over the years Microsoft has grown to a dominant player in the operating system market.
In 2005, Queen Elizabeth II named Gates an Honorary Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.
Jony Ive (27 February 1967 - )
Jony Ive is an industrial and product designer. After designing household products he joined Apple in the US where he became the senior vice-president of industrial design in 1997.
His first major success was the eye-catching iMac with its clear translucent plastic case. Over the years until 2019, Ive had an enormous influence on the design of Apple products, such as the iMac, Power Mac G4 Cube, iPod, iPhone, iPad, and MacBook.
He and Jobs were so close that there was a hidden corridor connecting their offices.
After playing a major role in the design of Apple Park, which was completed in 2017, he left Apple in 2019 to start his own independent design business, LoveFrom, with fellow Apple industrial designer, Marc Newson.
Queen Elizabeth II knighted Ive on New Year’s Eve 2011 for “services to design and enterprise” making him a Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. In 2006 he was awarded a Commander of the British Empire for design and innovation.
Sophie Wilson (1 January 1957 - )
Sophie Wilson became well-known as the computer scientist who designed the computers used for the BBC’s Computer Literacy Project in the 1980s.
After studying computer science at Cambridge University and designing a microcomputer with an MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor, she joined Acorn Computers where she worked on the first Acorn microcomputer.
When the BBC was looking for a suitable computer for its educational program, Wilson was asked to design a prototype within a week.
Her prototype, completed in a mere five days, was called the Proton and was a huge success.
In 1983 Wilson began designing the ARM reduced instruction set computer (RISC), which was successfully launched in 1985. The RISC processor became particularly popular in embedded systems and is currently the most widely used processor in smartphones.
Wilson now works for Broadcom as director of Integrated Circuit Design and was the chief architect of the FirePath processor.
Queen Elizabeth II appointed Wilson Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2019 for her services to computing.
Professor Louis CH Fourie is an extraordinary professor at the University of the Western Cape.
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