Re: The Founder of the Internet

["Kent W. England" <[e-mail]>]

At 05:04 PM 7/24/96 +0100, Zheng Wang wrote:
>In the article "Boost for Internet Telephony" in the July 15 issue of 
>CommunicationsWeek International, Vinton Cerf was referred as the
>"co-founder of the Internet". 
>
>Cheers
>Zheng
>
>
>

Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn deserve credit for the key idea behind the Internet,
which is that a virtual internet (or catenet as it was first called) can
stitch together many disparate network technologies and the resulting whole
will be greater than the sum of its parts. (ATM bigots need to remember this
last point.) The success of the Internet (as opposed to the Web) is almost
entirely due to this concatenation principle, something entirely missing
from any network technology up to that time.

Tim Berners-Lee deserves credit for taking the abstract concept of hypertext
and turning it into a practical reality. (Ted Nelson was never happy with
the compromises that Tim Berners-Lee happily accepted.) The Web made the
Internet "point and click" which was already a successful model for personal
computing. The success of the Web is almost entirely due to this very simple
and practical model. I think Marc Andreeson deserves a lot of credit for the
GUI web browser and the concept of giving away well done code.

And I don't forget Bob Metcalfe's contribution of Ethernet. Treating a wire
like wireless technology was counter-intuitive, brilliant and successful.
Truly "plug and play".

There is plenty of credit to go around appropriately. Maybe we need an
Internet Hall of Fame to get this all straight?

--Kent