Robert E. Kahn and Vinton G. Cerf, the men credited with designing the Internet’s communications structure, have received the 2004 A. M. Turing Award—the computer-science equivalent of the Nobel Prize. The pair of researchers, who met as graduate students at the University of California at Los Angeles, developed the backbone of the Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol, which enables computers on different networks to swap information back and forth.
The award may reignite controversy over which scientists, if any, can fairly be considered the inventors of the Internet. A handful of other researchers—including Leonard Kleinrock, a computer scientist at UCLA—have argued that they deserve more credit for inventing packet-shaping technology, which splits up data, sends them in pieces, and reassembles them when they have reached their destination.
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