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Draper Prize honours four `Fathers of the Internet'
When the $500,000 Charles Stark Draper Prize is awarded on February 20, the heat will be lowered a few degrees in the long-simmering debate over who invented the Internet. The prize money will be split between four cyber folk heroes: Vinton G Cerf and Robert E Kahn created TCP/IP, the Internet's standard communications protocol. Lawrence G Roberts is credited with cobbling together the Advanced Research Project Agency's network known as ARPANet, which was the Internet for the better part of 25 years. Leonard Kleinrock devised a key Internet technology known as packet switching that sent the first recorded e-mail message in 1969. The big four, all in their early or mid-sixties, have not lacked for recognition over the years, each racking up dozens of prizes, honorary degrees and fellowships. Mr Kahn chuckles when he recalls Princeton University bestowing a honorary degree upon him years after he had already earned his doctorate there. What makes the Draper Prize different and able to help settle the score isits extensive peer review - engineers judging engineers. The Draper Prize, after all, is awarded by the National Academy of Engineering, established in 1964 and part of the 128-year-old National Academy of Sciences. The NAE is confident enough of its selection that it has dubbed this year's award winners, "the four Fathers of the Internet." "There are so many people who made valuable contributions. The difficulty is in deciding where to stop. We have a fairly strong feeling that if you [enlarged the group], it would become very, very large. These four made particularly important contributions," says NAE President William A Wulf. "After the four, it would go into many tens." The NAE first identifies the invention and then advertises in technical journals and academia for nominations. The big four were culled from about 70 nominations by a group of 13 engineers. The half dozen finalists, which can be individuals or groups, must receive at least one "competitive" or "highly competitive" ranking, explains MrWulf. Those still in the running get checked out by a sub-committees, which returns its findings to the larger group and then the final decision is made. "I'm not going to report back what happens in the committees," says Mr Wulf. "The difficulty is in deciding where to stop." Indeed. What about Bob Metcalfe who invented Ethernet networking? Tim Berners-Lee started the World Wide Web, didn't he? Mr. Cerf credits Donald Davies with coming up with the term "packet" as it relates to networking. Paul Baran is another early networking pioneer. Fast-forwarding ahead a couple of decades, Marc Andreessen popularized the Web browser in the mid-'90s as a college student. To be sure, there are probably 50 individuals who played pivotal roles in making the Internet what it is today, but the body of evidence in countless books, scholarly treatises and now fading memories say their work was of lesser importance in the Internet's murky origins. They were add-ons to the foundation established by the big four. And after all, no one knew in the late '60s or early '70s what their groundbreaking technology would lead to. But they weren't clueless, either. "Computer networks are still in their infancy, but as they grow up and become more sophisticated, we will probably see the spread of utilities, which, like present electric and telephone utilities, will service individual homes and offices across the country," Mr Kleinrock said in the July 3, 1969 press release out of UCLA detailing the first computer networks comprised of different computer types. Only one ofthe four will go so far as to say the Draper award solves the Internet question once and for all, and that is Mr Roberts, now CTO at Caspian Networks Inc in San Jose, California. WSJ Copyright © 2001 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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