To: Moonray who wrote (10802 ) 12/16/1997 8:59:00 PM From: Glenn D. Rudolph Respond to
CORRECTED - Clinton bestows medals on Internet pioneers
Reuters Story - December 16, 1997 19:06
%ELI %US %NEWS %WASH %BUS %TEL %ENT %DPR %CXN MCIC INTC V%REUTER P%RTR
In WASHINGTON story headlined "Clinton bestows medals on
Internet pioneers" please read in second paragraph ...TCP/IP
protocol... instead of ...TCI/IP protocol...(corrects acronym).
A corrected repeat follows.
WASHINGTON, Dec 16 (Reuters) - President Clinton Tuesday
awarded the national medal of technology to two inventors whose
efforts to link military computers by radio, satellite and
telephone wires 25 years ago evolved into the globe-spanning
Internet.
Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn, inventors of the TCP/IP
protocol, said they started their research to solve a military
command and control problem, never dreaming it would end up
spawning a vast new medium for commerce and communications.
"We weren't thinking in megalomaniac terms," Kahn, now
president of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives,
said after the awards ceremony. "It was a very small-scale
scientific problem -- how do we get machines on different nets
to work together."
"We were thinking about getting these three damn networks
to work together," Cerf, senior vice president at MCI
Communications Corp. added.
The protocol allowed different types of computers running
different software to exchange information without any central,
top-down control.
Contrary to popular myth, the goal was not to help the
network survive a nuclear attack, but rather to allow computers
to be connected quickly in a war situation over radio and
satellite links without a predesignated plan.
"This was a self-organizing network," Cerf said. "It was
intended to be sort of dropped out of the backs of airplanes
with parachutes, land on the ground and organize itself because
you couldn't plan what the topology was going to be."
Once in place, as part of the military's ARPANet, the
network needed strong support from its inventors to avoid
losing funding.
"For 25 years, Vint and I were nurturing and guiding,
proselytizing and cajoling and sort of helping making this
thing not die a thousand deaths along the way," said Kahn.
Until the late 1970s, Kahn said he could carry in his
pocket a list of all the computers connected to the net. "There
was a time when people who wanted to get on the Internet had to
ask one of the two of us," he said.
In the 1980s, the National Science Foundation took
responsibility for running the Internet. But with the growing
commercialization of the network, the U.S. government is
planning largely to privatize its oversight.
The network now adds thousands of new connections every
month. "We clearly do not know what all is on the Internet,"
Cerf said. "It's changing so fast that every time you look
you're wrong."
Cerf and Kahn were among 14 recipients of science and
technology awards on Tuesday.
Previous winners of the technology award include Microsoft
Corp chairman Bill Gates and Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel
Corp .
