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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Is William Shatner presenting the award?

[ddkilzer]

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

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