The Prince of Asturias Foundation
Lawrence Roberts
Internet has completely revolutionised information transfer processes, and has ushered in unrestricted, worldwide information flow. The momentous research and development programme behind it has been led by a range of researchers and research teams who have applied their great vision of the future to turn what years ago was Utopia into a tangible reality by designing and setting up the protocols, the technology needed for link-up, and the access services to bring all this about. The work of Lawrence Roberts, Robert Kahn, Vinton Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee is in this sense a major step forward for the benefit of mankind.
Lawrence G Roberts was born in 1937 in Connecticut, USA; he spearheaded the systematizing of formulas for routing and locating servers on data networks. He was also CEO of Telenet, the first packet data communications carrier, which went on to develop the X25 Protocol that became the basis of the EUNet European network. He is now the president of Caspian Networks, one of the United State's premier applied research centres.
Robert Kahn
Internet has completely revolutionised information transfer processes, and has ushered in unrestricted, worldwide information flow. The momentous research and development programme behind it has been led by a range of researchers and research teams who have applied their great vision of the future to turn what years ago was Utopia into a tangible reality by designing and setting up the protocols, the technology needed for link-up, and the access services to bring all this about. The work of Lawrence Roberts, Robert Kahn, Vinton Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee is in this sense a major step forward for the benefit of mankind.
Robert Kahn was born in 1938 in New York, is the joint inventor of the TCP/IP protocols, and was responsible for setting up the Defence Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) Internet programme. He also developed the concept of a digital object infrastructure as a middleware component for the National Information Infrastructure, providing a framework for the interoperability of heterogeneous computer systems. At present he leads the Corporation for National Research Initiatives. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and of the assessment committee on information technologies for the President of the United States.
Vinton Cerf
Internet has completely revolutionised information transfer processes, and has ushered in unrestricted, worldwide information flow. The momentous research and development programme behind it has been led by a range of researchers and research teams who have applied their great vision of the future to turn what years ago was Utopia into a tangible reality by designing and setting up the protocols, the technology needed for link-up, and the access services to bring all this about. The work of Lawrence Roberts, Robert Kahn, Vinton Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee is in this sense a major step forward for the benefit of mankind.
Vinton Cerf was born in 1943 in Connecticut, USA, graduated in Mathematics at the University of Stanford, and earned a PhD in Computer Sciences at California University. Together with Robert Kahn he designed the TCP/IP computer protocols to link computers regardless of their type of connection -radio stations, satellites and telephone lines- for the military´s ARPANET. He designed MCI MAIL, the first Internet-linked e-mail service, between 1982 and 1986. His most recent work includes an interplanetary Internet project, called InterPlanetNet for short. At present he is vice president of Internet Architecture and Technology at Worldcom Corporation.
Tim Berners-Lee
Internet has completely revolutionised information transfer processes, and has ushered in unrestricted, worldwide information flow. The momentous research and development programme behind it has been led by a range of researchers and research teams who have applied their great vision of the future to turn what years ago was Utopia into a tangible reality by designing and setting up the protocols, the technology needed for link-up, and the access services to bring all this about. The work of Lawrence Roberts, Robert Kahn, Vinton Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee is in this sense a major step forward for the benefit of mankind.
Tim Berners-Lee was born in 1955 in the U.K. and graduated in Physics in 1976 from Queen´s College, Oxford. Whilst working as a research fellow at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory, in Geneva, he conceived the idea of a global hypertext project, which years later was to become the World Wide Web. He created a prototype in 1990, and in 1991 the Web began to exert far-reaching changes on the Internet environment of the time, to the point where the world's population can now access it. Berners-Lee moved to the United States in 1994 and set up W3C, which he manages at present. This organisation is linked to the M.I.T., and works not only as a Web information storage point but also as a safeguard, defending the open Web in the face of private concerns wishing to bring in software that is subject to ownership rights.
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