Tagged with Inductee Profiles & Insights
Wired 2012 Editorial Series Results in 31 Inductee Interviews
Blog entry
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...
MoreSay Bonjour to the Internet’s Long-Lost French Uncle
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The Internet was built on TCP/IP, networking protocols originally created by American computer scientists Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn. But Cerf and Kahn were building on the work of Louis Pouzin. In the early 1970s, working as a researcher for the French government,...
MoreHow the Queen of England Beat Everyone to the Internet
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Peter Kirstein is the man who put the Queen of England on the Internet in 1976. That’s Her Majesty in the photo, and if the year isn’t immediately obvious from the computer terminal she’s typing on — or from her attire — you can find it on the wall, just to her left, printed on one of the signs...
MoreHow Joe Biden Accidentally Helped Us All E-Mail in Private
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In the late ’80s and early ’90s, Phil Zimmermann was a Colorado peacenik with a half-written program that he swore would one day let people exchange messages without Big Brother peering inside. The problem was, with a freelance job and two kids,...
MoreWho Built the Internet? People Like Tan Tin Wee
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The internet wasn’t built by money-hungry American corporations and Silicon Valley startups. It was built by a worldwide community of government researchers and academics who were primarily interested in spreading the benefits of computer networking to as many people as possible. It was built by...
MoreThe Legacy of Linus Torvalds: Linux, Git, and One Giant Flamethrower
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Linus Torvalds created Linux, which now runs vast swathes of the Internet, including Google and Facebook. And he invented Git, software that’s now used by developers across the net to build new applications of all kinds. But that’s not all Torvalds has given the Internet. He’s also started some...
MoreDanny Cohen Engineered the Internet to Take Flight
Blog entry
It is a bit of a surprise when Danny Cohen sits down at the table in his Palo Alto flat with nothing but a few sheets of paper, and a lovely vintage Mont Blanc fountain pen. As someone who built some of the foundational technologies we use today, you expect a flurry of gadgets to accompany a...
MoreRemembering Jon Postel — And the Day He Redirected the Internet
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One January day in 1998, Jon Postel emailed eight of the 12 organizations that handled the address books for the entire internet. He told them to reconfigure their computer servers so that they pulled addresses not from a government-backed operation in Herndon, Virginia, but from a machine at the...
MoreMeet John Klensin, Internet History’s Jack of All Trades
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What did John Klensin do for the Internet? A little bit of everything. In April, Klensin was inducted into the Internet Society’s (ISOC) Internet Hall of Fame, entering alongside such notable names as...
MoreLeonard Kleinrock, the TX-2 and the Seeds of the Internet
Blog entry
It was 4:00 in the morning, and Leonard Kleinrock was sitting inside MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory on the outskirts of Boston, hunched in front of a massive computer system known as the TX-2. This was the early 1960s, and Kleinrock, an MIT graduate student, was designing a new means of sending...
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