She has already been president of the British Computer Society and was the first feamle senior vice-president of the Royal Academy of Engineering. She is a professor of computer science at the University of Southampton here in the UK, and sits on the Prime Ministerial Council for Science and Technology. Now Wendy Hall, responsible for creating the Microcosm hypermedia system which is widely thought of as being a predecessor to the World Wide Web, has been honoured by the Queen and made a Dame for her services to science and technology.
It is not her first royal honour, having already been appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2000 Birthday Honours. Nor is it the first time she has been considered to be the First Lady of the Web, after all back in 2006 she co-founded the Web Science Research Initiative with Sir Tim Berners-Lee amongst others. WSRI exists to bring together academics, scientists, sociologists, entrepreneurs and decision makers from around the world in order to create a multidisciplinary research body to provide practical solutions to the problems facing the Web in the future.
On hearing of her elevation to Dame, Wendy Hall said that she didn't think computer scientists "get the rewards they deserve, when you think that computers are what run the world at the moment."