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

About time

[shadowknot]

TCP/IP has played a pivotal role in the revolutionised age of information and communication.

Re:About time

[mboverload]

Forget TCP, it's all about UDP. In fact I'll switch to UPD transfer now:

I se dad pepe n y back yrd.

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

Good to see a news that really matters

[MasterOfUniverse]

Seriously folks, I think this news really fits the "news for nerds. stuff that matters " slogan.

Packet switching before them?

[Anonymous Coward]

What about Donald Davies and Paul Baran, the guys who invented packet switching in the 60s? Their work directly led to the development of the first internet protocol, NCP. TCP/IP didn't replace NCP fully until 1981, although we should be glad it did.

Re:Packet switching before them?

[the_2nd_coming]

hmm.. did NCP make it posable for the internet?

that is like saying "what about the guy who first cut open the chest of some one and failed to successfully perform heart surgery?"

the people that get credit for stuff are not the ones who come up with an under performance. they are the ones that come up with something that out performs even what they thought posable.

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.

And the funny thing is...

[Anonymous Coward]

... 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"

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?

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.

the father of SMTP certainly will not win

[the_2nd_coming]

ever!!!!

but I bet the father of the protocol that sits on top of SMTP to add SPAM protection will.

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

My appreciation for standards

[eseiat]

Computing standards are so incredibly important to the successful distribution of PCs throughout the world and the TCP/IP standard is perhaps one of the most important, considering the vast importance of the internet and network-based communications.

Congratulations to some truly innovative pioneers.

They haven't received one yet?

[KiltedKnight]

It's about *bleep*ing time.

You'd have thought they would've received this during the dot-com boom or before that.

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).

I won that

[Anonymous Coward]

At least I think I did. I was communicating with the award via a teletype and hed to guess whether it was a real award or a computer simulation of one.

It's suprising

[sdm39]

It's suprising the people who architect some of the finest PC ideas are not recognized more by the media. Everyone knows who Bill Gates is, but when you ask someone who were some of the people behind TCP/IP or C++ or anything besides windows, they have no idea.

Re:It's suprising

[Anonymous Coward]

Calling C++ a "finest idea" makes you a pervert.

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

Re:It's suprising

[QMO]

Although I agree that ornamentation usually gets more attention than substance, Henry Ford is not, IMO, a good example.

He, more than any other single person, is the reason why I can own my own car.

Perhaps more importantly, and counterintuitive, he made cars cheaply in part by paying his workers more.

"Henry Ford has made more money by paying more and charging less . . ." - Will Rogers (I think)

I don't know what kind of a buddy Ford would have been, but I think it's unreasonable to think that he didn't change the automobile industry.

Re:It's suprising

[rs79]

Usually, it's the flashy fast-talking man who gets the press.

Maybe that's why google has 10X the number of hits for

"father of the internet" cerf

than with Kahns name. Bob did the vast majority of the work on TCP/IP and is still a scientist, Vint is the Madonna of the modern internet. Capable, but truly adept at shameless self promotion.

Bob Matcalf (who invented ethernet) called Vint "Darth Cerf".

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

Nice to see

[dj_whitebread]

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.

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

TCP part

[mboverload]

We all know /IP is just leeching off TCPs success!

Not exactly a perfect invention

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously though ... award them for creating the TCP layer, which breaks down massively under (non-congestion related) packet loss? Award them for creating IP, which trivially allows source address forgery in yet another DDoS against my IRC server?
I'm not saying what they did was all bad ... in fact it was essential for the Internet today, and they deserve praise, but what they did was far from an optimal implementation. Considering all the mad fanboying going on here, I just felt I had to post this.

Great read

[mboverload]

I suggest people read this article, a great description of the TCP/IP stack. One of the best Wikipedia entries anywhere.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCP/IP#Layers_in_the_ TCP.2FIP_stack

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.

Size does not matter

[SpaghettiPattern]

Kahn and Cerf deserve credit they are getting but not based on the mere fact that the whole world uses TCP/IP. I mean to say that if you'd reason merely by size then good ole Bill would be a candidate for the Turing award. The reasons why IP has become the default network protocol should be stated more clearly.

IMHO the genius of Kahn and Cerf lies in the fact that they "thought deeply of simple things" almost exactly like Thompson and Ritchie did with Unix. For me, the transmission error handling and the routing are simply beautiful.

If a packet is lost, IP and UDP simply don't care and neither should the underlying layers do (forget about x.25 for a moment.) Try explaining this apparently frivolous approach to an IBM SNA guy -or even to most non networking CS people. Hell, IBM even built quality of service stuff in their Tokenring stuff. Nice to have, if you can switch it OFF. If a packet or frame is lost: too bad, TCP will take care of it, anything else should stop whining about it.

The fact that part of the routing is done by IP on any node is also marvelous. It made the protocol usable in small networks without having to buy or explicitly set-up a router. You know, equipment used to be horribly expensive. Ever studied SNA or OSI?

There would be loads of jobs for us techies in supporting the Internet if it were made up SNA, OSI or NetBIOS. But who'd want them?

Would Metcalf deserve the same honor as Kahn and Cerf but then for inventing Ethernet? I'd say yes.

Another argument against software patents

[KevinDean]

This part of the article jumped out at me:

"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."

What would the internet be today if they'd tried to squeeze every last cent out of this idea?

Re:Why ?

[Tablizer]

It's a serious insult to compare this to Einsteins innovations. This just strengthens the view that computer science is a pseudo science like social sciences in the scientific community.

Well, *most* sci/tech awards don't measure up to Einstein's work. Those are big shoes to fill. Perhaps they should rank the awards, or offer a Century Award for the biggies. Einstein didn't even get a prize for relativity, it was something slightly more obscure IIRC.

But you are right in that much of software and computers revolves around "soft" issues. Nobody can "prove" that relational or OOP is better then what came before/aside them. That is why we have so many language and paradigm holy wars. But this just means that software is transcending the physical world, and the variations and possibilities of virtual worlds is wonderous, personal, and confusing; making judging difficult.

Is William Shatner presenting the award?

[ddkilzer]

"The 2005 Turing Award goes to Vinton G. Cerf and Robert E. KAAAAAAAAAAAAAHN!!!!!"

Thank you for Jon Postel links.

[LouisvilleDebugger]

Thank you for posting these links. I never knew Jon Postel, and I was a toddler whenever RFC #1 came out in the very early 1970's (and I'm just a plain old midwestern hacker-for-pay now.) But reading Cerf's remembrance of Jon Postel always make me cry, like right now.

What a strange beast, the Internet, which can be a vessel of human connection, understanding and sharing of feelings, aside from all the latching shift registers and so forth.

Mr. Morse transmitted over an early electronic network, "What hath God wrought?" Don't know the answer to that, but I do know what Morse, Cerf, Postel and others hath wrought.

Thanks for reminding us.

Turing award?

[spongman]

does this mean we won't be able to tell the difference between talking to them and talking to real people?

As they say, "put up or shut up"

[anti-NAT]

award them for creating the TCP layer, which breaks down massively under (non-congestion related) packet loss?

The greatest majority of traffic on the Internet is TCP acknowledgments (35%), meaning that TCP is the most used transport layer protocol of the few other alternatives. If it is as bad as you say it is, why is everybody using it ?

If you're such an expert, spend time fixing the problems you think exist, by contributing to the IETF, rather than running an IRC server, and complaining anonymously about DDoS attacks on slashdot.

Right Guys, Wrong Award

[amightywind]

It seems to me that TCP/IP is an fine engineering result that has benefited from being in the right place at the right time. If circumstances were different we would be lauding the inventors of Banyan Vines or DECnet or some schlock M$ protocol. Thankfully we are not. But the idea of associating workmanlike engineering results with a theoretical genious like Turing and other deserving winners of the Turing Award is irksome.

Vint Cerf - helping to destroy the net

[gorbachev]

http://www.spamhaus.org/news.lasso?article=158

For a man that was so instrumental in creating the underlying technology the Internet is based on, he sure has come a long way since then.

He works for MCI, the only US network that refuses to terminate spammers, spamware peddlers and bulletproof hosting facilities. Vint Cerf is claiming they can't do that, because of 1st Amendment issues. For someone as smart as him, he sure can be clueless; 1st Amendment does not apply to anyone but the US Government.

This is what Steve Linford of spamhaus.org wrote on SPAM-L yesterday about Vint Cerf's role, among other things, in all this:

MCI, right up to Vint Cerf, are insisting that Send Safe is just ordinary software with no illegal features, and that it "could" be used for spamming only in the way a crowbar could be used for breaking and entering, or an innocent tobacco pipe could used for smoking dope. Our reply to these analogies is that if you sell pipes specifically designed for use with marijuana, with features only for marijuana use, and the pipe is designed to contact the pusher and download the marijuana into it's bowl, and designed to hijack innocent people (proxies) to pass the marijuana smoke through before inhaling to implicate them, while anonymising the smoker from the police by rotating the smoker's name, and even comes packaged with lists of innocent people pre-infected to be used for this purpose, you can bet you're going to jail.

I reminded Vint Cerf of his "spam is bad for the net" quote displayed on the CAUCE site, and asked for his help in getting the MCI spamware issue solved. He said he'd look into it, but got back to me saying the 1st Amendment made MCI not terminate spamware vendors no matter how illegal... so I gave him a link to the LINX BCP document and quoted the LINX text to him, he replied that the LINX BCP document was "probably illegal" in the USA (and hence MCI was ignoring it). Basically, MCI is trying every excuse under the sun to keep Send Safe and the many spam gangs they're servicing.

MCI says Send Safe is not the MCI customer, their customer 'MTI' is an "ISP" who is in turn reselling to Send Safe and it's therefore out of
their control. They know perfectly well (and are lying to the press that they don't) that ROKSO-listed MTI is Rusty Campbell's (DesktopServer) spamware outfit, not an ISP by any stretch of imagination, and that ISPs don't normally have only 6 IPs, and that the Send Safe website is directly on the end of the MCI line, one IP away from Rusty's router.

John St. Clair and the rest of the 'abuse' droids at MCI have known perfectly well for over a year that MTI's sole business is spamming and that the sole things hosted on Rusty Campbell's web server at 65.210.168.34 are 25 web sites, which are:

1 0-BULKEMAIL.COM.
2 ADOGWITHOUTWARNING.COM.
3 AMAZING-BULK-EMAIL.COM.
4 AMAZINGBULKEMAIL.COM.
5 BULK-EMAIL-WORLDWIDE.COM.
6 BULKEMAILREVIEW.COM.
7 BULKEMAILREVIEWS.COM.
8 DESKTOP-SERVER.COM.
9 DESKTOPSERVER.BIZ.
10 DESKTOPSERVER.COM.
11 DESKTOPSERVERPRO.COM.
12 DESKTOPSERVERSALES.COM.
13 DESKTOPSERVERSHOP.COM.
14 EASYBIZ.COM.
15 EMAILBROADCASTER.COM.
16 EMAILEMAILEMAIL.COM.
17 EMAILTOOLS.COM.
18 MONEYFUN.COM.
19 MTICD.COM.
20 MTIDEALER.COM.
21 MTIHELP.COM.
22 MTILAB.NET.
23 MTISOFTWARE.COM.
24 SEND-SAFE.COM.
25 THEINTERNETBIZ.COM.

MCI says these are all normal customers of the "ISP" Rusty Campbell who just happens to be the author of DesktopServer and to MCI it's all good paying business and nobody's going to stop them, least of all those darn anti-spammers.

Amazingly, in 2003 we had kicked Send-safe.com off 4 Chinese "bullet-proof hosts" before they found safe haven at MCI in the US. MCI makes even the worst Chinese network look clean.

Steve Linford
The Spamhaus Project
http://www.spamhaus.org

Important but a Turing Award?

[AnonymousCactus]

It's no doubt that we would speak about Internet protocols a little differently had these guys not done what they did, but to me it seems like we'd just be saying some other acronym (does anyone really buy that they invented the idea of packets and it didn't come about until 1973?) They invented the basic scheme, but the real cleverness seems to have come as a result of the various exponential-backoff mechanisms and other complexities in today's implementation of TCP/IP, not the basic protocol they designed in the 70's.

Looking at the previous winners it's kind of hard to tell what the point of the Turing award is. In some cases it's given to researchers that have made very influential theoretical break-throughs and others that seem to have invented something that became popular. Maybe I'm just being sidetracked by what is essentially the old debate about whether "systems" research is true research since it's often difficult to comparatively evaluate alternatives.

I just like to see the award go to people that did something that no one else (or at least very few people) working at the time would have been likely to think of and I'm not sure this meets that criterion.

Re:Turing what?

[jc42]

Heh. I do recall some time back reading of a Turing-machine emulator that was programmed to do a number of simple tasks, and one was responding to a few simple IP packets. It did have a problem that the speed was far too slow to be usable in a real network. It was really just a "proof of concept". But why else would you build a Turing machine?

It was also limited by the failure to implement an infinite tape. ;-)

I don't remember where I read this; it's been a while. I know that a number of different people have written Turing-machine emulators. Right now, google gets over 14,000 matches for "Turing-machine emulator", so there's lots out there to read. A quick check found several that include programs to do various odd tasks, none very useful. This is irrelevant, of course, since the Turing machine exists primarily for its mathematical properties, not for any practical purpose.

And for geek jokes.

Did they really deserve it?

[northcat]

Remember, it's not how popular it was, it's how important and valuable it was. I thought the Turing award was, unofficially, only for deep theory shit.