Laurels for Giving the Internet Its Language

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SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 15 - Late in the summer of 1973, two young scientists in the nascent field of computer networks hunkered down in a conference room of the Cabana Hyatt Hotel in Palo Alto, Calif., a clean but bland stopping place for salesmen and the parents of students at nearby Stanford University. Their goal was to thrash out a way to make different, isolated computer networks talk to each other.

They wrote, they sketched, they argued, all the while passing a yellow legal pad back and forth to capture ideas as they crystallized.

When they emerged two days later, they knew they had the makings of a solid technical paper. What they did not know was that they had created the essential underpinnings of today's vast and sprawling Internet.

For the work that began on that yellow pad, the Association for Computing Machinery plans to announce Wednesday that Vinton G. Cerf and Robert E. Kahn will receive the 2004 A. M. Turing Award, widely considered to be the computing field's equivalent of the Nobel Prize.

NY Times

[Berserker]

1. Great Story

sounds like my business partner and myself only we toss back a few cold ones during the inception of our ideas.

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2. One of the finest pieces of design work I've seen, computing-wise.

They got it exactly right, and the only way that is right.