Gore, Bush, and Berners-Lee rock into 'net Hall of Fame

The Internet Society has begun its own hall of fame for the bad boys and girls of the information superhighway. The internet glitterati are organized into three categories: Pioneers Circle, Innovators and Global Connectors. Inductees include Al Gore, Linus Torvalds, Sir Tim Berners-Lee and the delightfully named Randy Bush, …

[Anonymous Coward]

Earlier tl;dr Warning Needed

"But what the list members lack in sex, drugs and other shenanigans they more than make up for in intellect and their ability to change the world."

[Derek Kingscote]

Remedy Required

On the assumption that the "Inductees Alphabetically" list is complete

One or two serious omissions here methinks...

Licklider and Clark should be there as visionaries Licklider is mentioned in the "A Brief History of the Internet"

In August 1962, Licklider and Welden Clark published the paper "On-Line Man Computer Communication", one of the first descriptions of a networked future.

Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner, a married couple who worked as computer operations staff members at Stanford University, later joined by Richard Troiano founded Cisco Systems in 1984

and perhaps most important

1978 -- Dennis C. Hayes and partner Dale Heatherington, working on Hayes’ dining room table, developed the first personal-computer modem and formed a company.

Us oldies will now get all nostalgic thinking of the MF dialling tones; the b'doing b'doing and hiss of handshakes and data.

and the AT command set ...

Remedy required forthwith !

[Notas Badoff]

But it _is_ the "Internet Hall of Fame"

So Hayes et.al don't really seem to fit well. After all, would Teletype qualify? Acoustic couplers? Token ring? No...

Don't know about the others you mentioned.

Glad to see Jon Postel remembered fer shur.

[Shannon Jacobs]

Re: But it _is_ the "Internet Hall of Fame"

Is shur something he did beyond the RFCs? Or is it just your attempt to sound folksy?

Having said that, I think Postel deserved more than his name in the actual article.

[Alister]

Re: But it _is_ the "Internet Hall of Fame"

Yes, the Internet, not the World Wide Web. Don't mistake the one for the other. So for the Internet yes, definitely Hayes et al should get a mention, the advent of comparatively cheap, accessible commercially available modems made the difference in terms of consumers ability to access to the networks, which was the real start of the internet.

[Crazy Operations Guy]

Linus makes but better people don't?

ken and dmr deserve a spot on this list long before Linus does. If it wasn't for them, Linus would have nothing to copy, let alone a Programming language to do so.

Without Linus, we still have plenty of other operating systems such as the various BSDs, Solaris and a smattering of other commercial Unixes, all of which derived from ken and dmr's work those many years ago.

Hell even the guy that wrote DOS deserves to be on this list before Linus, his OS went on to dominate the market with installation on greater than 90% of all desktops and significant portion of servers.

[Nights_are_Long]

Re: Linus makes but better people don't?

Yea DMR needs to be on that list, hell I suspect that BSD would be dominating the web world over Linux if it wasn't for the licence nastiness that gone on in the 90's and the early comp-sci bubble period grads using linux in server farms.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Linus makes but better people don't?

I think you are confusing DOS with the Windows NT family which is an entirely different beast (still an ugly one though).

While I respect the work of Linus, I entirely agree your stance on ken and dmr too; those guys paved the way for many of the other folks who were inducted.

[Spud2go]

Please not Gore

If the man's head gets any more over-inflated it could get messy!

[Ralph B]

Re: Please not Gore

But he invented the Internet, didn't he?

[Anonymous Coward]

Jesus H Christ

I really freaked when I saw Bush's name next to Gore's. Whew.

[Valerion]

What?

No Kim Dotcom?

[Goes to 11]

No Ted Stevens?

“The internet is not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes.”

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: No Ted Stevens?

Ted was ahead of his time. When the internet water slide comes out, Ted will have the last laugh.

[Michael Wojcik]

These things are always arbitrary

... but some of their choices are puzzling. Fine, include TBL because the WWW is a major Internet application, and the one most visible to non-technical users. But Linus? What does Linux have to do with the Internet? It's just one of many OSes with TCP/IP networking.

I wouldn't include Hayes in my list of Internet greats, as a couple of people suggested, but I'll agree that dialup - even when not used to carry an IP link - to Internet-connected hosts played a large role in the growth of Internet use, and it created the market for end-user broadband connections.

Some I might have considered who weren't included: Marc Andreesen (largely responsible for pushing graphical browsers, which was critical to the popularization of the web, and to web commerce); Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis (for Usenet, originally UUCP but eventually another major Internet application and hugely important for spreading technical knowledge); and W. Richard Stevens (wrote probably the most influential works on TCP/IP programming).

I was glad to see they included Kilnam Chon and SDN - a non-US TCP/IP network that predated the Big Switch in the US. And Steve Crocker - the Internet would look very different without the RFC process.