Members of our nominating committee talk about why they chose “Alphabet Soup” – the technology and technologists behind all those acronyms that baffle civilians – among their personal “7 Wonders of the Internet.”
Jim Albright: IP protocol – The Internet in its infancy needed an addressing scheme that was routable and scalable. Behold what may be the only technology to survive unchanged since those early days. There may be a better way to handle global addressing through binary numbers, but no one has been able to come up with it yet.
HTTP – The hypertext language, with its graphics, browsers and hyperlinks has moved the Internet out of the university and into the living room. Can you imagine “every man” using Archie, Gopher, and command line FTP? I can’t. By making the Internet user friendly, this technology has caused an explosion in the markets for PCs and commercial ISPs and made a web page almost a requirement for any business. The Internet was around for roughly a quarter of a century before the World Wide Web, and was primarily the province of research institutions and government agencies. The average person had not heard of it. In less than half that time, it has become a household word. Without HTTP, it would still be the obscure domain of the technology elite.
Johna Till Johnson: DNS. No DNS, no Internet. Simple as that. What makes DNS special is that it’s a) distributed (no single point of failure) b) simple c) provides a necessary decoupling between physical and virtual addressing. DNS was created by Paul Mockapetris and Jon Postel.
Ken Diliberto: All the unsung heroes. Sure, you’ll probably focus on single people or companies. Big deal. I could care less about Joe CEO or Jane CIO. No one person or company makes the Internet. Cisco could go away and other companies would step up to fill the gap.
Unsung heroes include Harry the hard working network guy and Clara the clueful server gal. They are responsible for making things work – every day. And night. Weekdays. Weekends. Holidays.
See where I’m going with this? While I’m not directly responsible for stuff these days, I help a lot of people who are. When a worm brings down the Internet, Cisco isn’t fixing it. People in the field are. When slammer came out, I (along with a lot of others in the networking field) were spending our weekend trying to stop the bleeding.
Liam Noonan: DNS – simple elegant yet robust and it still works. … VoIP – Now all the Irish expats can talk to Mammy in Ireland for free or a ridiculous low price.
Johna Till Johnson: Jon Postel (RIP). There is no such thing as “the Father of the Internet” (pace Al Gore and Vint Cerf). But if there were, it would be Jon. Read the Wikipedia entry to see why (the BBC article entitled “God of the Internet is dead” basically showcases all the biggest names saying, “Jon WAS the Internet”)
If the Internet is Middle Earth, Jon Postel was basically Gandalf: wise, thoughtful, charismatic, a natural leader — and very, very, very nice.
John Gog: The Domain Naming System – I don’t think anyone beyond the tech-minded ever stops to think about how the Internet would be only the province of geeks if DNS didn’t work. In fact, it’s probably safe to say that without DNS, there would be no practical World Wide Web.
Bob Brown: Root server system: How the heck doesn’t this thing get destroyed by hackers?
(Return to next slide: “Bad to the backbone”)
