Cerf and Kahn win major computing award

Internet pioneers are first networking winners of Turing Award

By Robert McMillan

February 16, 2005 12:00 PM ET

IDG News Service - The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is finally giving networking technology a little respect. Yesterday, the 58-year-old organization for computing professionals announced plans to award Internet pioneers Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn its prestigious A.M. Turing Award.

Awarded annually since 1966, the $100,000 Turing Award is named for British mathematician Alan M. Turing. Past recipients include mouse inventor Douglas Engelbart, and Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, the creators of Unix.

The 2004 award is the first to be given for work in computer networking, said Virginia Gold, a spokeswoman for the ACM. It will be presented at a June 11 event in San Francisco, she said.

News of the award came as a "huge surprise," Cerf said in an e-mail interview. "Historically this award has gone to people more involved in fundamentals of computer science. It is a stunning honor to be included in the list of earlier awardees," he said.

"The importance of networking is only just being demonstrated, so this recognition does not strike me as late," he added. "It would not surprise me to find that others who have made fundamental contributions to the networking of computing will be recognized in the future."

Cerf and Kahn developed the notion of the Internet Protocol while working on a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency project in 1973. The next year, they published a paper on the Transmission Control Protocol, which could be used to route messages that were broken up into packets of data.

In 1988, Cerf joined long-distance telecommunications company MCI Inc., and he has played key roles in many groups that put the Internet on the map, including the Internet Society and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. He is senior vice president for technology Strategy at MCI.

Kahn is chairman, CEO and president of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, which he founded in 1986.

Reprinted with permission from

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