SideBar    National Medal of Technology Laureates

Networking and Communications Innovators
Robert Metcalfe
Bob Metcalfe was so fascinated with technology and gadgets that by the age of 10 he already knew he wanted to be an electrical engineer. In 1972, at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), he was asked to build a network that would connect the hundreds of PARC computers that resided in one building. And the network had to be fast enough that the networked computers could use the extremely fast laser printer that Xerox was developing at the time. The result was Ethernet. In 1979, Metcalfe formed 3Com and started working to promote PC LAN and Ethernet as standards.

Ray Tomlinson
In 1972, Ray Tomlinson developed SNDMSG, a timesharing system that let 20 or 30 users share a mailbox on a single computer and leave messages for each other. But electronic mail between computers didn't exist. Tomlinson, who was working for BBN Technologies, wrote a simple file-transfer program that carried a file from one machine and dropped it onto another machine. He "hacked together" SNDMSG and the file-transfer program to send email messages from one computer across a network to another computer. Tomlinson also came up with the idea of using the @ sign in email addresses.

Vinton G. Cerf and Robert E. Kahn
In 1973, Robert Kahn approached Vinton Cerf with a problem: finding a communications protocol that could span dissimilar networks and let host computers communicate across multiple packet networks without knowing the underlying network technology. The solution was a protocol: TCP/IP. Although they developed the protocol before PCs and workstations, before LANs, and before the Web, TCP/IP is still a fundamental Internet protocol.

Tim Berners-Lee
During a 6-month stint at CERN, Tim Berners-Lee wrote a program to help him remember connections between various people and projects. The program, Enquire, was never published. In 1984, Berners-Lee began a fellowship at CERN, and in 1989 he proposed a global hypertext project based on Enquire. The result of this work, WorldWideWeb, was first used internally at CERN in 1990 and on the Internet at large in 1991. In 1994, Berners-Lee formed the World Wide Web Consortium (WC3). His creation is so pervasive to modern culture that TIME hailed him as one of the 100 greatest minds of the 20th century.

Marc Andreessen and James Clark
When Marc Andreessen was a student at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois, most of the available Web browsers ran on expensive UNIX machines. He decided to develop an easy-to-use, graphically rich browser. In 1993, he posted Mac, PC, and UNIX versions of his browser, Mosaic, to NCSA's servers, where it was a huge hit. When Andreessen graduated and moved to Palo Alto, he met James Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics. They formed Mosaic Communications (later Netscape Communications) in 1994. Just weeks after Andreessen and Clark released Netscape, it became the browser of choice for most Web users.



Quotes

Marc Andreessen:
What we were trying to do was put a human face on the Internet. The Internet at that point was a tool for researchers and scientists. You had to be a UNIX hacker if you were to use it.*

Vinton Cerf:
We began doing concurrent implementations at Stanford, BBN, and University College London. So effort at developing the Internet protocols was international from the beginning.

Dave Cutler:
Little did I know that I would be fortunate enough to develop several operating systems in my lifetime; developing one is a rare opportunity for anyone.

Michael Dell:
Our industry is more like an ecosystem where you have lots of companies working together. Some create ingredients, some create systems, some have distribution and sales, some have a combination of all of the above.

Doug Engelbart:
I had thought if we show this to the world, within a matter of months the research community would say, 'Let's go after this kind of online flexible work.' What happened? Nothing. One guy thought it was a hoax and got very upset and angry.*

Bill Gates:
It was a wild time. It was a very exciting time. We started when I was 19, and so we had a lot of energy.*

Steve Jobs:
It was remarkable—especially for a 10 year old—that you could write a program in BASIC, let's say, or FORTRAN, and this machine would take your idea, execute your idea, and give you back some results. If they were the results that you predicted, your program really worked.*

Bob Metcalfe:
I wanted to be a professor at MIT. They would not have me, so they forced me to take much more money to move to Palo Alto, California, to be surrounded by some of the world's best computer scientists with no students to deal with and no teaching load and an infinite budget for capital equipment. It was horrible.*

Gordon Moore:
In a business like this, the people with the power are the ones [who] have the understanding of what's going on, not necessarily the ones on top.*

Ray Tomlinson:
It was just a hack. And the next step was to get other people to try using it, because so far I'd only sent mail to myself first and then to the other people in my group.*

Linus Torvalds:
(post on the comp.os.minx Usenet newsgroup): Hello everybody out there using minix. I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like GNU) for 386 (486) AT clones. This has been brewing since April and is starting to get ready. I'd like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat.*

Quotes from Nerds 2.0.1: A Brief History of the Internet by Stephen Segaller, copyright 1998, Oregon Public Broadcasting. Reused with permission.


End of Article

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