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By the Internet Hall of Fame Editorial Staff
Here’s a factoid for everyone who thinks that nothing about Internet Hall of Famers could ever surprise them:
The man who invented email raises rare, tiny French sheep.
At just a foot-and-a-half high, the Ouessant breed has a couple of huge advantages. “They’re easy to handle and don’t need a lot of land,” Ray Tomlinson says of his flock.
Tomlinson, an inaugural inductee into the Internet Hall of Fame, can’t spend too much time playing Little Boy Blue: He’s still working for Raytheon BBN in Cambridge, Mass., as he has for 46 years. These days, he’s involved with a project to try to tap the power of the crowd – specifically, the computer gaming crowd – to solve software problems. In the game he’s developing, players try to move through various levels, as they do in many other games, but what they’re really doing is helping to improve the software that’s running the game itself.
“We’re going to try to make players feel as if they’re only playing a game, but with each move they make, we’ll actually be taking advantage of pattern recognition and other processes that humans are capable of,” he says. The real goal of the game is ultimately to help improve the robustness of security on the...
By the Internet Hall of Fame Editorial Staff
The 1980s were a time of all-out enthusiasm on the part of brilliant computer-science researchers who saw amazing possibilities for changing the world. Larry Landweber brought them all together, setting off an explosion of synergy that resulted in the Internet we know today.
It was while teaching computer science theory at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1977 that Landweber began to see the mind-boggling implications of connecting some of the world’s great minds. For four years, he went into “learning mode,” as he calls it, soaking up knowledge and ideas from the nation’s top innovators in the field of networking.
In 1981, he obtained National Science Foundation funding to create the Computer Science Network (CSNET), which extended the benefits of networking to universities outside the Defense Department’s ARPANET.
Thanks to CSNET, scientists at hundreds of universities could now share ideas.
He didn’t stop there: He created a series of International Academic NetWorkshops (“the Landweber Workshops”) throughout the 1980s at which researchers and engineers shared the software they were developing in their own countries, and learned from one another.
“These people were to become the...
The 2013 Internet Hall of Fame inductees will be announced in Istanbul, Turkey in a ceremony at the conclusion of the Internet Society’s INET Istanbul conference on 26 June. Global business, policy, and technology leaders will gather to examine key issues impacting the Internet and to recognize the landmark accomplishments of this year’s Internet Hall of Fame inductees.
INET Istanbul and the Internet Hall of Fame awards ceremony is open to all registrants on a first-come, first-served basis (registration links below). The ceremony will also be live streamed, or you can follow events on Twitter and on Facebook.
“With its booming Internet economy, Istanbul will provide the ideal backdrop for this impressive assembly of business and policy thought leaders with the Internet’s pioneers and visionaries,” noted Internet Society President and CEO Lynn St. Amour.
The 2013 Internet Hall of Fame inductees will once again reflect the broad and varied...
Tour Brewster Kahle’s Internet Archive near San Francisco, and be sure not to miss the “terra cotta archivists” in their pews! Kahle, with this “Library of Alexandria 2.0,” is not just digitizing every book ever published: His goal is to preserve all the world’s knowledge.
In April 2012, shortly after the inaugural induction of over 30 Internet luminaries into of the Internet Hall of Fame, Wired launched a special editorial series to cover the event. The result: A collection of 31 exclusive interviews that capture each inductee’s historic contribution to the Internet. The 2012 interview collection can be found in its entirety on our blog.