"The Association for Computing Machinery plans to announce Wednesday that Vinton G. Cerf and Robert E. Kahn will receive the 2004 A. M. Turing Award, widely considered to be the computing field's equivalent of the Nobel Prize," reports Katie Hafner in The New York Times.
The Association "was careful to word the award citation so that it was clear that Dr. Cerf, now senior vice president of technology strategy at MCI, and Dr. Kahn, chief executive of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, a nonprofit research and development organization in Reston, Va., were being honored for their work on the Internet protocol, not the Internet as a whole, so as not to rile other claimants to the Internet's creation. Still, this is the first time in the 39-year history of the award that it has been conferred for work in computer networking - the key to enabling global data communications."
Comment: Hafner is co-author of an excellent book about the origins of the Internet: Where Wizards Stay Up Late.
