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 From the New York Times --
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/16/technology/16internet.html

Laurels for Giving the Internet Its Language
By KATIE HAFNER

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.


----

Today's New York Times reports Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn are to receive
this year's Turing Award.

The Times article also reports extensively about concerns that this award
would cause some further debate about who deserves credit for what
inventions that led to the Internet.

Speaking as the person who organized the nomination of Cerf and Kahn at
the request of ACM SIGCOMM, I offer two observations.

First, at last year's ACM Awards Banquet, several people noted that it was
great that Alan Kay (the 2004 Turing Award winner) was finally getting
recognition, and this led to a discussion of what areas of computer
science had not received recognition through the Turing Award.  Networking
seemed to be first on everyone's lips.

Second, a comment about the politics and pragmatism of awards.  ACM's
awards processes are, thankfully,  not terribly political.
But one odd quirk is that the Turing award committee has had some
(privately confessed) difficulty figuring out where networking fits in
computer science.  There's been some instinct to wonder if much of what
we do in networking isn't mathematics (e.g. queueing theory) or engineering
and thus something to recognize via some other award.

So SIGCOMM quietly canvassed a number of senior people inside and outside
the networking field, and we developed a list of people who had made
contributions, and especially computer science contributions, deemed
comparable to the contributions of past Turing Award recipients.  It
is a surprisingly long list.  One painful realization was that we're
about 20 years late in starting to recognize networking.  As a result
we've got pioneers who started working in the 1960s and 1970s who
are overdue for recognition, competing (in some sense) with extremely
talented and productive folks who started work in the 1980s and who are
now emerging as deserving of recognition in their own right.

In that light, I view the recognition of Bob and Vint as opening a door.
Now that the Turing Award has recognized networking as an important part
of computer science, it becomes easier to nominate others of our deserving
colleagues a few years down the road.  And it doesn't hurt that Vint and
Bob are two of the nicer guys I know, and thus wonderful people to have
open the door.

Craig

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