Tagged with Inductee Profiles & Insights
Why Do We Call Them Internet Packets? His Name Was Donald Davies
Blog entry
The fundamental technology underpinning the Internet is called packet-switching. And Donald Davies was the first one to call it that. In the mid-1960s, Davies was a researcher with Britain’s National Physical...
MoreWhat Do the H-Bomb and Internet Have In Common? Paul Baran
Blog entry
Paul Baran set out to build a means of communication that could survive a nuclear war. And he ended up inventing the fundamental networking techniques that underpin the internet. In the early 1960s — as an engineer with the RAND Corporation, the U.S. armed-forces think tank founded in the wake of...
MoreDaniel Karrenberg Helped Bring the Internet to Europe; Now He Keeps It Running
Blog entry
While Lawrence Landweber, Vint Cerf, and Bob Kahn were setting up America’s earliest network connections, across the Atlantic in Amsterdam, Daniel Karrenberg was building what would become Europe’s first intercontinental network. Arguably, Karrenberg’s contributions, coupled with innovations from...
MoreHow Pacific Island Missile Tests Helped Launch the Internet
Blog entry
There are a thousand stories about the origin of the Internet, each with their own starting point and their own heroes. Charles Herzfeld’s tale began in 1961 on a series of tiny islands in the South Pacific. The U.S. military was test-firing a series of ballistic missiles at the island chain, known...
MoreAlexandria 2.0: One Millionaire’s Quest to Build the Biggest Library on Earth
Blog entry
Here’s the problem with libraries. They catch on fire really easily. As such, they were the prized targets of the invading hordes of antiquity – the model collections of knowledge of their times, whose only fault was their inherent flammability. They were one-man, one-torch jobs. But the hordes...
MoreBob Kahn, the Bread Truck, and the Internet’s First Communion
Blog entry
The world’s first Internet transmission occurred on October 29, 1969. At least, that’s what some people believe. Others say the more important moment arrived eight years later, when a repurposed delivery van equipped with a wireless transmitter sent a message from San Francisco to Norway and back...
MoreLawrence Landweber Helped Build Today’s Internet, Now He’s Advising Its Future
Blog entry
When Lawrence Landweber created the Computer Science Network (CSNET), an intentionally open computer network that helped pave the way for the modern Internet, he knew one day its technology would be used in banking, travel, and commerce. He didn’t predict that the unsecure network he built would...
MoreWhy Does the Net Still Work on Christmas? Paul Mockapetris
Blog entry
In 1983, you could ask for your own internet address. But not after 6 p.m. California time. Or over the Christmas holiday. When the internet was still the ARPAnet — the government-funded network that connected various research outfits across the country — you couldn’t get an address without the...
MoreWhy Craig Newmark Sits at the Top and Bottom of Craigslist
Blog entry
Craig Newmark calls his recent induction into the Internet Hall of Fame for building Craigslist a “clerical error.” If it were (and it most definitely is not), there would be a certain symmetry to it. Errors, or happy accidents, have a way of finding the eccentric technologist. Newmark’s eponymous...
MoreFather of Australian Internet Warns of Address Crunch
Blog entry
Geoff Huston, the gadfly who got Australia online, warns that address shortage could strangle the Internet. Geoff Huston was born the year television arrived in Australia. But his parents wouldn’t let him watch....
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