Turing Award Recognizes Creators of TCP/IP
09 Sep, 2005

Once a year the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) bestows on one or more computer scientists the Alan Turing Award. The Turing award is given in recognition of "contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community." Last year the winner was Alan Kay. In 2003, Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adelman, of RSA fame, shared the award. The award includes a $100,000 grant, so it's a pretty big deal in the computing community.

This year the winners are Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn for their seminal work in defining how the core Internet protocols and addressing schemes work. If anyone can take credit for "inventing the Internet" it is these two gentlemen. While working together at DARPA in 1973 they literally invented TCP/IP.

The only downside to receiving the Turing award is that you have to give a lecture to the annual ACM SIGCOMM conference (held last week in Philadelphia). Rather than giving the standard "this is what I remember about inventing the Internet" speech, Cerf and Kahn decided to deliver their Turing lecture as an informal conversation.

It's a wonderful piece of video and can be viewed at http://www.acm.org/sigs/sigcomm/sigcomm2005/webcast.html. It's really fascinating listening to two of the world's premier computer scientists discuss what they did right, what they did wrong, and what their DARPA masters wouldn't let them do correctly for "security reasons". I highly recommend that anyone with an interest in the history of the Internet take an hour to watch.

- Phil