Five Internet Founders Share First £1 Million Engineering 'Nobel' Prize 55
judgecorp writes "The first Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, worth £1 million, has been shared by five founders of the Internet and the World Wide Web. In addition to Sir Tim Berners Lee and Vint Cerf, the other recipients are Cerf's colleague Bob Kahn, creator of the Mosaic browser Marc Andreessen, and a much less well known Frenchman, Louis Pouzin, aged 82. Working at Bell Labs, Pouzin invented the datagram protocols on which Cerf and Kahn based the TCP/IP protocols. The judges originally planned the prize for a maximum of three winners, but that had to change, thanks to the collaborative nature of the Internet. All the recipients praised their colleagues and pointed out that engineering is always a team effort: 'Fortunately we are still alive,' joked Pouzin. 'It is forty years since we did the things for which we are being honoured.' Awarded in the U.K., the prize is an international effort to create an engineering counterpart to the Nobels. The judges considered entries from 65 countries."
Re:Poor Al Gore (Score:4, Informative)
I take it the honorees must be living (Score:3, Informative)
Otherwise, Paul Baran (packet switching) and Jon Postel (RFC editor for IP, TCP, and many others) would probably deserve a share.
Re:Poor Al Gore (Score:5, Informative)
That's actually not true either. Al Gore didn't invent the idea of internetworking, or any of the protocols, but he was in fact instrumental in making it the "Internet" (big I) that businesses and individuals could connect to and actually use. In more technical terms, his bill (the "Gore bill") worked to transition the NSFNet away from a research system and towards, well, the Internet we have today. If that weren't enough, the bill also sent the funding to NSCA, which they used to create Mosaic.
Among the many technological achievements that resulted from the funding of the Gore Bill, was the development of Mosaic in 1993... Gore's legislation also helped fund the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, where a team of programmers, including Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, created the Mosaic Web browser, the commercial Internet's technological springboard. 'If it had been left to private industry, it wouldn't have happened,' Andreessen says of Gore's bill, 'at least, not until years later.
Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn (recipients of this award):
Gore's actual words were widely reaffirmed by notable Internet pioneers, such as Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, who stated, "No one in public life has been more intellectually engaged in helping to create the climate for a thriving Internet than the Vice President"
Purely a publicity stunt (Score:5, Informative)
None of these individuals need the money. Any one of them could raise $1 million from VCs in a few days, based on their reputation.
This money should have been used to fund new innovative ideas, but I suppose that wouldn't have grabbed the headlines for the main sponsors:
BAE Systems
British Gas
BP
GlaxoSmithKline
Jaguar Land Rover
National Grid
Shell
Siemens
Sony
Tata Steel.
It was just a stunt, and a fairly cheap one for companies of that magnitude.