Mount Rushmore of Internet Pioneers
Nestled in the Black Hills of South Dakota, Mount Rushmore National Memorial is a towering granite sculpture honoring four U.S. presidents who played pivotal roles in American history. These individuals were chosen for their extraordinary contributions to the nation during its first 150 years.
George Washington led America’s rag-tag military forces in their underdog victory over Great Britain and served as its first executive. Thomas Jefferson authored the Declaration of Independence and negotiated the Louisiana Purchase, a savvy acquisition which doubled the country’s land area. Six decades later, Abraham Lincoln navigated the fledgling nation through a tumultuous civil war and abolished the institution of slavery. And at the turn of the 20th century, Theodore Roosevelt facilitated the construction of the Panama Canal and acted as a tireless champion for environmental conservation and other important causes.
Today, these men are all household names, and the phrase “Mount Rushmore” serves as shorthand slang for the top four figures in any particular category (e.g., basketball players, rock guitarists, etc.). I’ve found it a useful framework for robust intellectual debates and misguided bar-room arguments alike.
Given the ubiquitous role that the Internet plays in modern life and how dreadfully little the average person knows about the people who invented it, I set out to honor these brilliant individuals by creating my own Mount Rushmore of Internet Pioneers. Drum roll, please…
Paul Baran: Packet Switching (1962)
During the height of the Cold War, a RAND researcher named Paul Baran was seeking to design a distributed communications network that could withstand a nuclear attack from the Soviet Union. Baran conceived an ingenious technique called “message blocks,” in which information is broken down into smaller parts that are routed separately and reassembled at the destination.
Donald Davies, a Welsh computer scientist, independently came up with a similar idea in 1965 and was co-credited with the invention. Today, this data transmission process is most commonly referred to by Davies’ preferred term of “packet switching.” Packet switching differs from “circuit switching” (the basis for traditional telephone networks) in that each packet of information finds its own optimum path from source to destination. This eliminates the need for a dedicated path between source and destination and makes more efficient use of the network’s bandwidth.
Lawrence Roberts: ARPANET (1966)
The actual Internet originated with the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), an experimental computer network funded by the U.S. Department of Defense in the late 1960's. ARPANET was the first network to successfully employ the revolutionary packet switching technique theorized by Baran and Davies on a large scale.
Lawrence Roberts, an M.I.T.-educated electrical engineer, was tapped to lead ARPANET. As program manager from 1967 to 1973, Roberts was responsible for designing the network and managing the overall logistics of the project. Roberts left DARPA to found Telenet, the first commercial entity to use packet switching on its network. Roberts would go on to found four other technology companies in a long and distinguished career as a scientist and businessman.
Vint Cerf: TCP/IP (1973)
After ARPANET, there was a proliferation of different computer networks in the U.S. and around the world, which necessitated the creation of a common language for communicating between them. Enter: the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP).
In 1973, Vint Cerf and his UCLA collaborator Bob Kahn co-invented a standardized set of rules specifying how data should be broken up, addressed, transmitted, routed, and received over these networks. By 1983, ARPANET was fully migrated to TCP/IP, and Cerf and Kahn’s brainchild remains the most popular computer networking protocol in the world today. Later, Cerf was founding president of the Internet Society from 1992–1995 and chairman of the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) from 2000–2007, and he currently serves as Chief Internet Evangelist for Google. Cerf is a living legend in the CompSci community.
Tim Berners-Lee: the World Wide Web (1991)
Often when we talk about the “Internet,” we are actually referring to the World Wide Web (WWW or Web), the information management system for websites and other online resources that sits on top of the Internet (i.e., a network of networks and computers). That conflation is only possible because of Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Thanks a lot, Tim!
While working at CERN in 1989, Berners-Lee wrote a memo outlining his ambitious idea for the Web. His boss at the time (in classic boss fashion) called it “Vague, but exciting”. Over the next several years, Berners-Lee would invent several important technologies to flesh out his idea that still serve as the foundation of the Web:
- Hypertext Markup Language (HTML): A “formatting” language that establishes the meaning and structure of web content.
- Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): A unique “address” that identifies each resource on the Web. The most common type is the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) used for most websites (e.g., www.espn.com).
- Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP): An application protocol for linking together online resources. Without HTTP, there would be no such thing as “surfing” the Web by clicking on links to other pages.
- WorldWideWeb (renamed Nexus): The first software application for accessing the Web. These are known today as “web browsers.”
Note: Berners-Lee hails from England, but the Internet has no nationality.
There you have it — my Mount Rushmore of Internet Pioneers!
Any questions? Comments? Statements of outrage?
In any exercise like this, there will be so many tough calls (that’s what makes it fun!). What about Ray Tomlinson, the inventor of e-mail, you may say? Or Linus Torvalds, the open-source advocate and founder of Linux? Or even former Vice President Al Gore… OK, let’s not get that carried away (sorry, Al).
Who’s on your Mount Rushmore of Internet Pioneers?
