Laurels for Giving the Internet Its Language

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: "John F. McMullen" <observer () westnet com>
Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2005 00:42:26 -0500 (EST)
To: johnmac's living room <johnmacsgroup () yahoogroups com>
Cc: Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>
Subject: Laurels for Giving the Internet Its Language

> 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
    johnmac () acm org johnmac () computer org johnmac () m-net arbornet org
                   johnmac () tmail com johnmac () echonyc com
            jmcmullen () monroecollege edu johnmac () alumni iona edu
               ICQ: 4368412 Skype, AIM & Yahoo Messenger: johnmac13
                   http://www.westnet.com/~observer
                  BLOG: http://johnmacrants.blogspot.com/

------ End of Forwarded Message


-------------------------------------
You are subscribed as lists-ip () insecure org
To manage your subscription, go to
  http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip

Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/