The Association for Computing Machinery announced today that Vinton G. Cerf and Robert E. Kahn will be the 2004 recipients of the prestigious A. M. Turing Award, widely regarded as the Nobel Prize of computing. As reported in today’s New York Times, Cerf and Kahn are credited with developing the foundation of the TCP/IP architecture in 1973. While neither Cerf nor Kahn could anticipate just how revolutionary their initial contributions would ultimately be, both recognized the demand for a global communications network long before it entered mainstream consciousness.
Some of Cerf and Kahn’s predictions about the internet from the early 1990’s are documented in the Elon University/Pew Internet Project Predictions Database. Additionally, Cerf was among the many luminaries who contributed to our 2004 survey of internet experts. The results from that survey are discussed in the Project’s “Future of the Internet” report, released last month and available here.
