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The Internet Science

ACM to Honor TCP/IP Creators with Turing Award 143

Posted by Zonk from the i-heart-packets dept.
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.
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ACM to Honor TCP/IP Creators with Turing Award More

ACM to Honor TCP/IP Creators with Turing Award

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  • About time (Score:5, Insightful)

    by shadowknot ( 853491 ) * on Wednesday February 16, 2005 @11:42AM (#11688937) Homepage Journal
    TCP/IP has played a pivotal role in the revolutionised age of information and communication.

  • This is a travesty (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    How could they have left out Al Gore?

    • Re:This is a travesty (Score:5, Informative)

      by gowen ( 141411 ) <gwowen@gmail.com> on Wednesday February 16, 2005 @11:49AM (#11689004) Homepage Journal
      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 [classroom.com] on Al Gore's important role in the creation of the internet (Link leads to full statement).
    • I demand a recount!

      We can not let Bush get away with this!
    • 1) Al Gore NEVER said he invented the internet. I'm still waiting to see someone provide any evidence of that.

      2) If it weren't for Al Gore, yes we probably wouldn't have the Internet. He's the one who pushed it through and got it funded. He does have some bragging rights.

      3) Stop listening to people like Rush Limbaugh who lie about this stuff day in and day out.
  • Seriously folks, I think this news really fits the "news for nerds. stuff that matters " slogan.

  • Packet switching before them? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 16, 2005 @11:46AM (#11688977)
    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.

  • And the funny thing is... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 16, 2005 @11:46AM (#11688980)
    ... 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?
    • 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 r

    • Not really the correct analogy. I think Slashdotters would end up in a gigantic flamewar where one side would say that TCP/IP is a horrible no-good half-afternoon hack and we should be supporting OSI which was actually designed, while the other half would be going like "well, TCP/IP works for me, and it's easier to understand".

      It's kind of like Java vs. PHP. Both are reasonably open standards, it's just that one is a commitee-designed monstrosity and other is an organically-grown weakling.

    • OSI copied IP, according to Dr Radia Perlman in Interconnections: Bridges, Routers, Switches, and Internetworking Protocols, 2nd Edition [awprofessional.com]. And if you don't know who she is, I'd suggest you spend some time finding out.

  • the father of SMTP certainly will not win (Score:4, Funny)

    by the_2nd_coming ( 444906 ) on Wednesday February 16, 2005 @11:46AM (#11688984) Homepage
    ever!!!!

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

  • My appreciation for standards (Score:5, Insightful)

    by eseiat ( 650560 ) on Wednesday February 16, 2005 @11:48AM (#11688995) Homepage
    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? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by KiltedKnight ( 171132 ) on Wednesday February 16, 2005 @11:49AM (#11689002) Homepage Journal
    It's about *bleep*ing time.

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

  • I won that (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 16, 2005 @11:50AM (#11689008)
    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 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sdm39 ( 859661 ) on Wednesday February 16, 2005 @11:55AM (#11689059)
    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 (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 16, 2005 @12:13PM (#11689229)
      Calling C++ a "finest idea" makes you a pervert.
    • TCP/IP (and C++) is a personal computing invention?

      Are you trying to distinguish yourself from people who can't see beyond their Windows PC?

    • Re:It's suprising (Score:5, Informative)

      by C10H14N2 ( 640033 ) on Wednesday February 16, 2005 @12:31PM (#11689448)
      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 [rfc-editor.org]
      http://www.usc.edu/dept/pubrel/trojan_family/sprin g99/Postel/postel.html [usc.edu]

      • Thank you for Jon Postel links. (Score:4, Insightful)

        by LouisvilleDebugger ( 414168 ) on Wednesday February 16, 2005 @01:40PM (#11690299) Journal
        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.

    • It's suprising the people who architect some of the finest PC ideas are not recognized more by the media.

      This happens in all areas, not just computer science. When was the last time you remember hearing Joseph Cugnot's name on the 11 o'clock news, or reading John Lambert's name in the paper? Both were pioneers in the automotive field -- the former developed the first self-propelled road vehicle, while the latter developed the USA's first gas-powered car -- but they seldom get any mention. Instead, yo

      • Re:It's suprising (Score:2, Interesting)

        by QMO ( 836285 )
        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 c

        • 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.

          I think it's a fairly accurate example. While this will surely be debated on Slashdot, Bill Gates is one of the main reasons why people have personal computers. Ask the general population about computers, and they'll mention MS-DOS or Windows. Look at the proliferation of Windows on the desktop. For Joe U

          • I think it's a fairly accurate example. While this will surely be debated on Slashdot, Bill Gates is one of the main reasons why people have personal computers. Ask the general population about computers, and they'll mention MS-DOS or Windows. Look at the proliferation of Windows on the desktop. For Joe User, Bill Gates personifies computing.

            You have 2 arguments there: 1st is whether Gates is, in fact, the "main reason" we have PCS on our desks. I submit this is not at all true. The main reason is cheap h

            • 1st is whether Gates is, in fact, the "main reason" we have PCS on our desks

              "One of" the main reasons. Like I said, that statement would provoke debate.

              As for what Joe User thinks, well, probably he does think Bill invented the Internet, the mouse, the keyboard, word processing, etc.

              ...which was really my point to begin with. The media and Joe Public will equate Henry Ford and Bill Gates to cars and computers, while failing to recognize the other players.

              That's all, really.


            • I agree very much with your statement. The alternative to DOS at the time was CP/M. It isn't like DOS was the only game in town.

              (And technically, it wasn't even the best game in town.).

              Most of what is good about DOS (in retrospect) is directly related to CP/M, and most of the problems with DOS are where it diverged from CP/M.

              We would be in a different world had CP/M taken off, and GEM had taken over the GUI. But we'd still have computers in our homes and we would still have the Internet.

              Just because p
            • I would argue that Steve Wozniak and Dan Bricklin, more than Bill Gates, is why we have computers on our desks. Wozniak created the first PC that you could buy _and_use_, instead of put together as a hobby. Bricklin invented the computer spreadsheet. Together, they sold a lot. Enough for IBM to notice. IBM cobbled together the PC from off-the-shelf components, and then got outside vendors to supply the operating system.

              All of that happened without Bill Gates.

      • Re:It's suprising (Score:3, Interesting)

        by rs79 ( 71822 )
        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".

  • Nice to see (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dj_whitebread ( 171775 ) * on Wednesday February 16, 2005 @12:02PM (#11689124) Homepage
    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.
    • >> Up until recently, it had been given solely to people in theory. "Hey, I heard you won the Turing award." "Well, in theory"
      • I was once talk to a friend of mine, taking the mick out of him for being a theoretical computer scientist, and he uttered a classic line "I'm not a theoretician and I can prove it." Still make me smile to this day.

    • Re:Nice to see (Score:3, Informative)

      by 14erCleaner ( 745600 )
      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 abou

      • My comment should be reworded. It has mainly given to people for their theoretical contributions. Thompson and Ritchie were sort of an anomaly.

        While I'm sure lots of the people on that list were fantastic practitioners, it was their more theoretical contributions that got them the award.

        And you only mentioned a few people from a very large list.

        The Turing Award people have only recently started to make the practitioners viable candidates every year.

        • There are some pure theory types, but look behind some of the names [acm.org], even many of the theory types have had huge practical contributions:

          1966 A.J. Perlis - compiler construction
          1967 Maurice V. Wilkes - builder and designer of the EDSAC, the first computer with an internally stored program.
          1968 Richard Hamming - error correcting codes
          1969 John McCarthy - (citation missing, but how about Lisp?)
          1972 E.W. Dijkstra - Algol
          1977 John Backus - FORTRAN
          1979 Kenneth E. Iverson - APL
          1981 Edgar F. Codd -

  • Why ? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The design of TCP/IP was not original, had flaws and violated several principles for communication protocol design. That's why we don'T see IPV6 used these days.

    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.

    • Re:Why ? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )
      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 compute
      • Einstein didn't even get a prize for relativity, it was something slightly more obscure IIRC.
        The Photoelectric Effect
      • Einstein didn't even get a prize for relativity, it was something slightly more obscure IIRC.

        True; it was for his early work in that obscure field called "quantum mechanics". ;-)

        Basically, he got the Nobel Prize for showing that light is quantized. His primary paper dealt with the properties of the "photoelectric effect", in which photons are absorbed and electrons are ejected. He showed that the energy of the photons and electrons isn't continuously distributed, but has only a small set of discrete val
    • It's true that there were other protocols like TCP invented at around the same time. It's also true that TCP had flaws, some of which have been fixed, and some of which haven't.

      To the extent that TCP violated "principles" those principles are debatable. TCP did make some design compromises - such as to use the same field for both an endpoint identifier and a locator - which seem shortsighted today but which also made TCP much eaiser to deploy at the time it was invented. In any engineering effort, it is
    • This just strengthens the view that computer science is a pseudo science like social sciences in the scientific community.

      Yeah, there's no reason we should study algorithms. Nobody uses them in day to day life. Oh wait...

  • TCP part (Score:3, Funny)

    by mboverload ( 657893 ) on Wednesday February 16, 2005 @12:11PM (#11689215) Journal
    We all know /IP is just leeching off TCPs success!
  • ...The RIAA/MPAA to award these guys with their 'own' award. Arguing that the invention of TCP/IP enables people to pirate intellectual property.

    You laugh, but it wouldn't surprise me.

  • Not exactly a perfect invention (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 16, 2005 @12:14PM (#11689245)
    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.
    • You could just boycott TCP/IP; it sure would make me happier!

    • 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

  • Great read (Score:3, Insightful)

    by mboverload ( 657893 ) on Wednesday February 16, 2005 @12:17PM (#11689282) Journal
    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 [wikipedia.org]

  • Did these guys invent UDP as well?

  • What about Van Jacobson? (Score:3, Informative)

    by GnoMoreGnuPuns ( 649356 ) on Wednesday February 16, 2005 @12:37PM (#11689512) Journal
    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 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SpaghettiPattern ( 609814 ) on Wednesday February 16, 2005 @12:45PM (#11689606)
    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 (Score:3, Interesting)

    by KevinDean ( 855785 ) on Wednesday February 16, 2005 @01:04PM (#11689816)
    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?
  • considered the "Nobel Prize of Computing

    Why isn't there a Nobel Prize of Computing? Just because they did not have computers in the 1800's is not a reason to not add it. They bent the rules for Economics.

  • Is William Shatner presenting the award? (Score:5, Funny)

    by ddkilzer ( 79953 ) on Wednesday February 16, 2005 @01:21PM (#11690028)
    "The 2005 Turing Award goes to Vinton G. Cerf and Robert E. KAAAAAAAAAAAAAHN!!!!!"
  • How about rewarding UDP/IP or ICMP/IP creators?

    I don't see why the IP protocol is always referred to as "TCP/IP" when TCP is only one of protocols running under IP.

  • Turing award? (Score:3, Funny)

    by spongman ( 182339 ) on Wednesday February 16, 2005 @01:46PM (#11690373)
    does this mean we won't be able to tell the difference between talking to them and talking to real people?
  • ..to thank the people who brought us TCP/IP. Because of you, I get to hear in a game of counter-strike such famous lines as: "nubs." "omfg LOL pwned!!!11" "you're a disgrace. leave this server." .. on a more serious note, tcp/ip has revolutionized our world, in spite of all the negative, there is a lot of positive with it as well.
  • seems like the mpaa and riaa can go after them since they invented the internet as it is today.

  • 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 th

    • OSI, like ASN.1, is one of those beautiful, elegant French things that look great in theory, but are rather hard to understand, and a fucking nightmare to implement. In fact, I didn't realise anyone had actually implemented OSI. It must have a lot of market penetration ...

  • Right Guys, Wrong Award (Score:3, Insightful)

    by amightywind ( 691887 ) on Wednesday February 16, 2005 @02:46PM (#11691095) Journal

    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 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by gorbachev ( 512743 ) on Wednesday February 16, 2005 @03:04PM (#11691325) Homepage
    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
    • Vint Cerf's not getting the award for his current activities, he's getting it for what he did years ago when, amongst other things, he was jointly responsible for devising TCP/IP.

      To draw a comparison, in later life Isaac Newton spent his time exploring rather idiosyncratic Bible interpretations, not to mention alchemy. That doesn't alter the fact that Newton's earlier scientific work ranks as one of the greatest achievements in science of all time.

  • Important but a Turing Award? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by AnonymousCactus ( 810364 ) on Wednesday February 16, 2005 @03:19PM (#11691514)

    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 [toronto.edu] 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.

  • Did they really deserve it? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by northcat ( 827059 ) on Wednesday February 16, 2005 @05:37PM (#11693157) Journal
    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.

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