From the New York Times -- http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/16/technology/16internet.html
Laurels for Giving the Internet Its Language By KATIE HAFNER Late in the summer of 1973, two young scientists in the nascent field of computer networks hunkered down in a conference room of the Cabana Hyatt Hotel in Palo Alto, Calif., a clean but bland stopping place for salesmen and the parents of students at nearby Stanford University. Their goal was to thrash out a way to make different, isolated computer networks talk to each other. They wrote, they sketched, they argued, all the while passing a yellow legal pad back and forth to capture ideas as they crystallized. When they emerged two days later, they knew they had the makings of a solid technical paper. What they did not know was that they had created the essential underpinnings of today's vast and sprawling Internet. For the work that began on that yellow pad, the Association for Computing Machinery plans to announce Wednesday that Vinton G. Cerf and Robert E. Kahn will receive the 2004 A. M. Turing Award, widely considered to be the computing field's equivalent of the Nobel Prize. Nearly a billion people have come to rely on the Internet as they do on a light switch. Very few know how it works, to say nothing of how it got here. A 10-year-old might think Google, Microsoft or perhaps Al Gore invented the Internet. In honoring Dr. Kahn and Dr. Cerf, the computing association validates one view in the highest ranks of computer science that their work made the Internet possible. It also revives the public spats in the small community of Internet founding fathers over who should be considered the Edison of this age. "A lot of people are responsible for the success of the Internet," said David Patterson, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, who is president of the association. "Vint and Bob are responsible for the vocabulary of the Internet." With that first generation of pioneers now graying, researchers and archivists are pondering the birth of the Internet in historic terms. That old yellow pad, if it had not been lost decades ago, would be a valuable collector's item now. In fact, a first edition of the technical journal in which the Cerf-Kahn paper, "A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection," appeared is being auctioned at Christie's next Wednesday as part of a larger sale of computer-science papers being sold by a collector in Novato, Calif. The journal is expected to sell for $2,000 to $3,000. In that early brainstorming session, Dr. Kahn, 66, and Dr. Cerf, 61, who are known in the computing field for their Watson-and-Crick-like teamwork, created the structure for Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol, or TCP/IP, a set of communications standards that enable different computer networks to share information, giving the Internet its power and reach. Dr. Patterson said his association was careful to word the award citation so that it was clear that Dr. Cerf, now senior vice president of technology strategy at MCI, and Dr. Kahn, chief executive of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, a nonprofit research and development organization in Reston, Va., were being honored for their work on the Internet protocol, not the Internet as a whole, so as not to rile other claimants to the Internet's creation. Still, this is the first time in the 39-year history of the award that it has been conferred for work in computer networking - the key to enabling global data communications. For computers to exchange digital data like Web pages, e-mail and digital movies, they have to agree on a method for communicating with each other. The Kahn-Cerf Transmission Control Protocol defines a standard way to package chunks of data into "datagrams," for sending across the network. The Internet Protocol provides a standard way of putting those datagrams into envelopes addressed to any computer in the world. Like postal sorters, the computers along the way can look at the addresses on the envelopes to relay them to their destinations without needing to look inside the envelopes. No one disputes that Dr. Kahn and Dr. Cerf created the original protocol, but factions in computer science point to different inventions as being most vital to the Internet's existence. Most notably, for the last 10 years, Leonard Kleinrock, a computer scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, has been laying claim to having invented packet switching, the general method of splitting up a message into digital packets, routing the packets individually and reassembling the message on the other end. Until Dr. Kleinrock began making his case prominently, two others, Paul Baran and Donald W. Davies, had been widely recognized as packet switching's inventors. Dr. Davies died in 2000. In recent years, Lawrence G. Roberts, who in the late 1960's designed the Arpanet, a precursor of the Internet, has been a supporter of Dr. Kleinrock's claim. Dr. Cerf, who was a graduate student working in Dr. Kleinrock's lab at U.C.L.A. when the first Arpanet link was installed there in 1969, is aware of the egos involved in this debate over legacy. He said he hoped the announcement of the Turing Award would not rankle colleagues. "Especially Larry and Len," he said. "They truly believe that their work was so integral to the Internet that every time Bob and I are mentioned they think they should get mentioned." This is not the first time Dr. Kahn and Dr. Cerf have been singled out. In 1997 they were awarded the National Medal of Technology. In 2001, Dr. Cerf, Dr. Kahn, Dr. Kleinrock and Dr. Roberts shared the Charles Stark Draper Prize for the development of the Internet. But the addition of the Turing Award to the trophy case could be a sensitive subject. "This will probably be troublesome," Dr. Cerf said. "But I hope not." Dr. Kleinrock, when informed of this year's award, said: "These awards are given on whatever measures and criteria the committees determine. There's plenty of credit to go around." Dr. Cerf and Dr. Kahn, who were informed of the award last week, will divide the $100,000 prize, which is named for Alan Mathison Turing, the British mathematician and cryptographer who broke German codes during World War II. The two, who have collaborated on and off for more than three decades, have different styles. Dr. Cerf, a bon vivant who usually wears a three-piece suit, is known for his good-natured pragmatism. Dr. Kahn is more intense. "Every meeting with Bob is like a Ph.D. oral qualifying exam," said David L. Tennenhouse, director of research at Intel, which sponsors the award. Dr. Kahn, he said, "will drill down on you" to uncover "inconsistencies in what you're saying." Yet both men are known for their wry senses of humor. "Maybe it's the humor that kept them together," Dr. Tennenhouse said. They first met in 1969 at U.C.L.A., after the first Arpanet nodes were installed around the country. Dr. Kahn, then working at Bolt, Beranek & Newman, an engineering firm, in Cambridge, Mass., spent time at U.C.L.A. conducting experiments on the new network. Since then, the two men have been intellectually "bound at the hip," seldom straying far from computer networking. In 1973, when they wrote the paper outlining their idea, Dr. Cerf had just joined the faculty at Stanford University and Dr. Kahn had moved to the Advanced Research Projects Agency at the Defense Department, which had funded the original Arpanet. Dr. Kahn said Dr. Cerf took the first crack at writing the specifications for the protocol. "After five or seven minutes, he said, 'I'm not sure where to start,' " Dr. Kahn recalled. "I said, 'Look, why don't you give me the pen,' and I wrote the first 10 pages," Dr. Kahn said. "Then he said, 'Why don't you give me the pen,' and he went from there." To determine whose name would appear first on the paper, they tossed a coin, and Dr. Cerf won. Dr. Cerf's secretary typed up the paper from the original notes, which have long since disappeared. "Vint never instructed her about what to do so she probably just threw that yellow pad out," Dr. Kahn said, with some remorse. Dr. Cerf said part of the reason their protocols took hold quickly and widely was that he and Dr. Kahn made no intellectual property claims to their invention. They made no money from it, though it did help their careers. "It was an open standard that we would allow anyone to have access to without any constraints," he said. Dr. Cerf said he was "pretty amazed" by what the Internet had become. He was quick to add, "I suppose anyone who worked on the railroad, or power generation and distribution, would have similar feelings about how amazing it is after you create infrastructure." Dr. Cerf is also quite realistic about the recognition his contribution deserves. Creating a tool is one thing, he said, but credit for what people do with it is something no inventor can claim. Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company *** FAIR USE NOTICE. This message contains copyrighted material whose use has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. The 'johnmacsgroup' Internet discussion group is making it available without profit to group members who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information in their efforts to advance the understanding of literary, educational, political, and economic issues, for non-profit research and educational purposes only. I believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use,' you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml "When you come to the fork in the road, take it" - L.P. Berra "Always make new mistakes" -- Esther Dyson "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" -- Arthur C. Clarke "You Gotta Believe" - Frank "Tug" McGraw (1944 - 2004 RIP) John F. McMullen [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] ICQ: 4368412 Skype, AIM & Yahoo Messenger: johnmac13 http://www.westnet.com/~observer BLOG: http://johnmacrants.blogspot.com/ ------ End of Forwarded Message --- The current wrangle over who invented the Internet was due to the way ARPA managed the original networking research. They treated everyone who participated on the early efforts as central to the final result. Every research project was needed and was integrated into the whole, thus no one part could be said to have been the most important. History shouldn't look on this as who was most important, or who was the creator of the Internet, but should rather recognize the masterful management that ARPA used to orchestrate the entire endeavor. The current DARPA could not do so now. That being said, congratulations to Vint & Bob for their richly deserved 2004 ACM Turing Award for their watershed work on tcp/ip. -- Diego Saravia [email protected] ar