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Five Internet Founders Share First £1 Million Engineering 'Nobel' Prize
judgecorp writes "The first Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, worth £1 million, has been shared by five founders of the Internet and the World Wide Web. In addition to Sir Tim Berners Lee and Vint Cerf, the other recipients are Cerf's colleague Bob Kahn, creator of the Mosaic browser Marc Andreessen, and a much less well known Frenchman, Louis Pouzin, aged 82. Working at Bell Labs, Pouzin invented the datagram protocols on which Cerf and Kahn based the TCP/IP protocols. The judges originally planned the prize for a maximum of three winners, but that had to change, thanks to the collaborative nature of the Internet. All the recipients praised their colleagues and pointed out that engineering is always a team effort: 'Fortunately we are still alive,' joked Pouzin. 'It is forty years since we did the things for which we are being honoured.' Awarded in the U.K., the prize is an international effort to create an engineering counterpart to the Nobels. The judges considered entries from 65 countries."
Al Gore could not be reached for comment, as he was busy hunting Manbearpig
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
No Al Gore?
Self-proclaimed? Nope.
You were critically hit for no damage. The bruise will look nice, and maybe the scars will make good party talk.
Did no one tell them that www != internet?
If they're going to award prizes to people who invented things that sit on top of the internet, where are the inventors of ftp, gopher, ssh, and usenet?
Most of that claim was not made by Al Gore, but by people trying to attack Al Gore.
Otherwise, Paul Baran (packet switching) and Jon Postel (RFC editor for IP, TCP, and many others) would probably deserve a share.
Unfortunately, the achievement they honored is marred by being the worst application development environment ever conceived. The only reason for its success is that it's open, which Sir Tim has consistently recognized, but the rest?
Damn, man, he's one of us:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_and_information_technology
That article doesn't mention it but I recall Gore pushing through another bill limiting taxes on e-commerce in an effort to allow the sector to grow back in the early days.
If we laugh at him we're laughing at ourselves, we're laughing with the jocks.
They're leaving the self-proclaimed inventor of the internet out of his 1/5 million pounds? Guess he'll just have to settle for the $100 million he made selling his TV network.
Why isn't this getting a troll mod? Gore never claimed to have invented the internet, that was an invention of the right wing Republicans. The right wingers also like to slam him for profiting on the sale of a TV network. Text book hypocrascy given the only thing sacred to the conservative right are profits. I guess a liberal making a profit is evil to them.
There are many comments on Al Gore on slashdot. I did not know what it was refering too. Apparently it comes from a quote in 1999.
http://www.snopes.com/quotes/internet.asp
FYI everyone Al Gore never claimed to have invented the internet, you really need to lay off Fox News, it kills brain cells. It's interesting that the first award would be for the founding of the internet. It's managed to eclipse other innovations in a little over a generation.
because it's funny and you are a liberal grouch.
Nothing is funny if you're a republican, and as a republican I don't find this funny.
I think (I hope?) that everyone knows the context and what he actually said. The jibes continue because the claim he actually did make was also pretty out-of-proportion to what he actually did, and hyperbolizing something as satire or comedy is a pretty common thing.
>> The first Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, worth £, awarded in the U.K., an international effort
One of those facts does not fit.
"During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet"
seriously snopes?
That's actually not true either. Al Gore didn't invent the idea of internetworking, or any of the protocols, but he was in fact instrumental in making it the "Internet" (big I) that businesses and individuals could connect to and actually use. In more technical terms, his bill (the "Gore bill") worked to transition the NSFNet away from a research system and towards, well, the Internet we have today. If that weren't enough, the bill also sent the funding to NSCA, which they used to create Mosaic.
Among the many technological achievements that resulted from the funding of the Gore Bill, was the development of Mosaic in 1993... Gore's legislation also helped fund the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, where a team of programmers, including Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, created the Mosaic Web browser, the commercial Internet's technological springboard. 'If it had been left to private industry, it wouldn't have happened,' Andreessen says of Gore's bill, 'at least, not until years later.
Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn (recipients of this award):
Gore's actual words were widely reaffirmed by notable Internet pioneers, such as Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, who stated, "No one in public life has been more intellectually engaged in helping to create the climate for a thriving Internet than the Vice President"
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
Marc Andreessen finally gets the recognition he deserves. The internet was built on the backs of so many that have failed to be rewarded for their efforts contributions and creations. Finally Marc is getting his due. I hope that he enjoys the money an treats himself to another Yacht or something special like a Jet. The creator of Lynx should field honored that his contributions were recognized.
Um, it says right there on Snopes that Al Gore said he created the internet. Did you actually read the article before posting it?
Snopes goes on to argue that he didn't actually mean what he said, but that doesn't mean he didn't say it.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Nah, St Mary's is still in but I wouldn't get excited until they beat Memphis. Then we're talking about the end times.
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
None of these individuals need the money. Any one of them could raise $1 million from VCs in a few days, based on their reputation.
This money should have been used to fund new innovative ideas, but I suppose that wouldn't have grabbed the headlines for the main sponsors:
BAE Systems
British Gas
BP
GlaxoSmithKline
Jaguar Land Rover
National Grid
Shell
Siemens
Sony
Tata Steel.
It was just a stunt, and a fairly cheap one for companies of that magnitude.
This is the problem in the UK - science is measured by "impact", not quality. But impact takes decades to materialise, so even if you do reward people who created impact, the reward is coming way too late to make any difference.
Why can't we give decent funding to brilliant young people to solve the problems of tomorrow? To me, that would make a lot more sense.
Gore's actual words were widely reaffirmed by notable Internet pioneers, such as Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, who stated, "No one in public life has been more intellectually engaged in helping to create the climate for a thriving Internet than the Vice President"
More of these outlandish AGW claims... ;)
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Did YOU actually read it? It quotes him directly and he didn't say "I created the Internet." He said he took the initiative in Congress in creating the Internet, and that is in fact what Congress did. Al Gore was instrumental in that process, though IMHO Boucher deserves as much credit or more. At the time, most Congresscritters couldn't even tell you what a computer was, and these guys were largely responsible for changing that.
"Took the initiative on creating" != "invented".
I'm Message Approval Man, and I approve this message.
I'm Message Approval Man, and I approve this message.
Sure do the right thing and freely release what became Apache into the world....
Sorry Bo McCool....
Seriously? Let me explain with an example.
politician: Decides the streets need to be cleaned. So they create funding and hire street sweepers.
IN an interview thay woulod say "I tool the initiative in creting the street sweepers.
Now, do you think he is saying he generically engineered street sweepers, invented brooms and truck? Or do you think he is talking about making the funds available to have street sweepers?
This is high school level stuff. So either you are so wrapped up in a belief you can't actually be rational, or you can't even understand conversation at a freshman high school level.
Instead of praising him for taking the political risk to making ARPANET open, and calling it 'The Internet' , people like you need to come up with twisted ways to blame him for it.
Be smarter.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It wasn't out of proportion at all. He did the one thing the engineers absolutely had to have but couldn't do: he got if funded. He believed in it and could see the vision of it. Without that, there simply would be no interenet. Money makes the world go 'round. So, I think it's fair to say he was absolutely instrumental in making it happen. It should also be noted that he has never attempted to garner any credit for the internet in a technical fashion.
Are agnostics skeptical of unicorns too?
Oh please, you're intentionally misquoting the guy now. Look at the snopes page:
Argue semantics all you want, but he did say he created the internet. It's right there, clear as day. Forget what he wanted to say, forget what he meant: look at what he SAID.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/left_and_right.html
"Although the [extreme] Right and [extreme] Left have major differences that make it almost impossible for them to agree on anything, they also have certain -- if not immediately apparent -- similarities as well. In fact, they are remarkably similar for how different they are. Since these similarities are of a type that tends to make them blind to any other view, these similarities further reinforce the dichotomy between them: that is, the similarities I am about to discuss make for more differences."
Without the internet and the world wide web on top of it, it is unlikely I could have learned so much or passed it on to others, like I mentioned in this essay from 2004:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/AchievingAStarTrekSociety.html
"First, as a side note, I could not have written an essay like this before the World Wide Web -- I just would not have had the time to cover so many areas in a couple days writing from home, far from a university library, and relying on Google to make solid ideas that were just wisps of memory (from years of reading broadly on the web); nor would I before the wide adoption of the internet and email and the world wide web have been able to provide immediately accessible links for further exploration by readers, all at essentially no direct monetary cost. That is an example of the sort of exponential increase in technological capacity this essay is referring to. I certainly would not call this essay a scholarly work as it neither cites enough primary sources or connects all the dots, and I'm sure it has its share of flaws, but please consider it as a proof of concept that if even a little of what I write is true, there is enough to go around and make this Earth a more fantastic and more free place for every being on it. "
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.