ACM to Honor TCP/IP Creators with Turing Award

bth writes "The New York Times reports that Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn will receive the ACM Turing Award. According to the ACM website: The Association for Computing Machinery, has named Vinton G. Cerf and Robert E. Kahn the winners of the 2004 A.M. Turing Award, considered the "Nobel Prize of Computing," for pioneering work on the design and implementation of the Internet's basic communications protocols." Commentary from Groklaw also available.

Comments

Re:This is a travesty

[gowen]

I am taking the liberty of sending to you both a brief summary of Al Gore's Internet involvement, prepared by Bob Kahn and me. As you know, there have been a seemingly unending series of jokes chiding the vice president for his assertion that he "took the initiative in creating the Internet."

Bob and I believe that the vice president deserves significant credit for his early recognition of the importance of what has become the Internet.

Vint Cerf on Al Gore's important role in the creation of the internet (Link leads to full statement).

Re:Packet switching before them?

[Anonymous Coward]

Read the article!

----

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.

Re:This is a travesty

[OwnedByTwoCats]

Darn. Preview didn't show it formatted that badly. Take 2.

http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interes ting-people/200009/msg00052.html

Al Gore and the Internet

By Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf Al Gore was the first political leader to recognize the importance of the Internet and to promote and support its development.

No one person or even small group of persons exclusively "invented" the Internet. It is the result of many years of ongoing collaboration among people in government and the university community. But as the two people who designed the basic architecture and the core protocols that make the Internet work, we would like to acknowledge VP Gore's contributions as a Congressman, Senator and as Vice President. No other elected official, to our knowledge, has made a greater contribution over a longer period of time.

Last year the Vice President made a straightforward statement on his role. He said: "During my service in the United States Congress I took the initiative in creating the Internet." We don't think, as some people have argued, that Gore intended to claim he "invented" the Internet. Moreover, there is no question in our minds that while serving as Senator, Gore's initiatives had a significant and beneficial effect on the still-evolving Internet. The fact of the matter is that Gore was talking about and promoting the Internet long before most people were listening. We feel it is timely to offer our perspective.

As far back as the 1970s Congressman Gore promoted the idea of high speed telecommunications as an engine for both economic growth and the improvement of our educational system. He was the first elected official to grasp the potential of computer communications to have a broader impact than just improving the conduct of science and scholarship. Though easily forgotten, now, at the time this was an unproven and controversial concept. Our work on the Internet started in 1973 and was based on even earlier work that took place in the mid-late 1960s. But the Internet, as we know it today, was not deployed until 1983. When the Internet was still in the early stages of its deployment, Congressman Gore provided intellectual leadership by helping create the vision of the potential benefits of high speed computing and communication. As an example, he sponsored hearings on how advanced technologies might be put to use in areas like coordinating the response of government agencies to natural disasters and other crises.

As a Senator in the 1980s Gore urged government agencies to consolidate what at the time were several dozen different and unconnected networks into an "Interagency Network." Working in a bi-partisan manner with officials in Ronald Reagan and George Bush's administrations, Gore secured the passage of the High Performance Computing and Communications Act in 1991. This "Gore Act" supported the National Research and Education Network (NREN) initiative that became one of the major vehicles for the spread of the Internet beyond the field of computer science.

As Vice President Gore promoted building the Internet both up and out, as well as releasing the Internet from the control of the government agencies that spawned it. He served as the major administration proponent for continued investment in advanced computing and networking and private sector initiatives such as Net Day. He was and is a strong proponent of extending access to the network to schools and libraries. Today, approximately 95% of our nation's schools are on the Internet. Gore provided much-needed political support for the speedy privatization of the Internet when the time arrived for it to become a commercially-driven operation.

There are many factors that have contributed to the Internet's rapid growth since the later 1980s, not the least of which has been political support for its privatization and continued support for research in advanced networking technology. No one in public life has been more intelle

Re:It's suprising

[C10H14N2]

Yes, it's surprising Jon Postel's name is still so rarely even mentioned.
In Vinton Cerf's words:
ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc2468.txt
http://www.usc.edu/dept/pubrel/trojan_family/sprin g99/Postel/postel.html

What about Van Jacobson?

[GnoMoreGnuPuns]

Jacobson introduced congestion control to TCP after the threat of catestrophic congestion meltdown was imminent. This is arguably the aspect of TCP that made it viable as a global Internet protocol. It suprises me that this would be overlooked by the award.

Re:And the funny thing is...

[FreeUser]

if they were starting out now, slashdotters would be cursing their names because its clear that they were trying to foist a proprietary standard over the completely open, free-software friendly, OSI infrastructure, probably with a view to "Embrace and Extend"

Some slashdotters might. This is hardly a unified group, much less a group consciousness.

OTOH if it were Microsoft introducing the standard, those expressing worry probably would be correct in their concerns, if history is any judge at all.

Now a real question : If Baran and Davies had been granted a patent on packet switching networks in 1964, what would the internet look like now?

There probably wouldn't be an internet now. OSI defines a vague 7-level abstraction for which AFAIK no unencumbered implimentation exists.

The patents for TCP/IP might have expired by now (or might not, since other nuances of the protocol could be patented, effectively extending the existing patent an iteration or two, as is common with other patents which have been granted), but the internet would probably still not be created because too many existing "island-nets" (like compuserve, genie et al once were) would exist, and the Department of Defense (the creators of our Internet) would have no interest in persuing or deploying dated technology (which is what TCP/IP would be considered today, given their proprietary rivals, e.g. TCP/IP v6 which would no doubt still be under patent).

Luckilly for us patents didn't abort the internet. However, they are aborting the next generation breakthrough even as I type this, and half the people here won't care less as long as this quarter's profits aren't flat.

Re:About time

[Detritus]

The revolutionary part of TCP/IP was the idea of the catenet (concatenated networks). This allowed IP to run on top of all of the proprietary networks that existed

Re:the father of SMTP certainly will not win

[C.A. Nony Mouse]

Jon Postel passed away in 1998. His contributions to the field were far more important than those of most Slashdot whiners.

Jon's homepage

Also check RFC 2468.

J

We Put Up with TCP/IP!!!!

[CyNRG]

Just like Betamax was a better standard than VHS, OSI is better than TCP/IP.

TCP/IP was only meant for dial-up modems. I've been using it since the Internet was called DARPA-Net, and it was great back then when error correcting was needed in layer three.

The TCP layer always had error-correcting code in it, and re-transmits, etc. When reliable network media showed up, the error-correcting code wasn't needed, although it didn't hurt to much at 10Mb/sec. Once 100Mb/sec showed up, the media was faster than the protocol. I couldn't get more than 9.6Mb/sec of 100Mb/sec link using TCP. I tested with an OSI stack and achieved 67Mb/sec of 100Mb/sec link. Everyone said that OSI was to fat and too much overhead, what a load of BS!

The OSI stack is still better than TCP/IP! They've tried to fix TCP/IP for years by extending it and now it is a real mess and insecure. OSI was well thought out and designed. FTAM has record level file access for goodness sakes! Pissed me off then, still does today.

Marketing and politics, sheesh.

Re:Nice to see

[14erCleaner]

The Turing award is slowly starting to recognize people who have designed, built, and deployed systems. Up until recently, it had been given solely to people in theory.

I don't think you have the faintest idea what you're talking about. The winners (list below, from ACM's website) have always been a mixture of practitioners and theorists. For example, Wilkes built the first stored-program computer, Backus was in charge of the first successful compiler project, Knuth created TeX, and everybody knows about Thompson & Ritchie's accomplishments in "designing, building and deploying systems". (except you, maybe :).

1966 A.J. Perlis
1967 Maurice V. Wilkes
1968 Richard Hamming
1969 Marvin Minsky
1970 J.H. Wilkinson
1971 John McCarthy
1972 E.W. Dijkstra
1973 Charles W. Bachman
1974 Donald E. Knuth
1975 Allen Newell, Herbert A. Simon
1976 Michael O. Rabin, Dana S. Scott
1977 John Backus
1978 Robert W. Floyd
1979 Kenneth E. Iverson
1980 C. Antony R. Hoare
1981 Edgar F. Codd
1982 Stephen A. Cook
1983 Ken Thompson, Dennis M. Ritchie
1984 Niklaus Wirth
1985 Richard M. Karp
1986 John Hopcroft, Robert Tarjan
1987 John Cocke
1988 Ivan Sutherland
1989 William (Velvel) Kahan
1990 Fernando J. Corbato'
1991 Robin Milner
1992 Butler W. Lampson
1993 Juris Hartmanis, Richard E. Stearns
1994 Edward Feigenbaum, Raj Reddy
1995 Manuel Blum
1996 Amir Pnueli
1997 Douglas Engelbart
1998 James Gray
1999 Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.
2000 Andrew Chi-Chih Yao
2001 Ole-Johan Dahl, Kristen Nygaard
2002 Ronald L. Rivest, Adi Shamir, Leonard M. Adleman
2003 Alan Kay