He would say to you that you are all wrong and that he never should have been chosen to receive this award. He was a fairly humble guy and would sit here—and it’s been a recurring theme—he would begin naming the names of all the people who really did the work. And he would sort of just say, “I was there.”
Archive (Page 4 of 5)
Aaron fought tirelessly to make information free, and keep the Internet free, and to make academic research available for free, among other things.
After two weeks we were nowhere. And it drove home to me the concept of information poverty in a way that no other experience had.
In 2002, I took up another challenge. That is, how we make these computers available for people who do not speak English?
The first Internet exchange without a gateway in the middle appears to have been in College Park, beginning in about 1986, and I was fortunate enough to be at the right place at the right time.
He was happy working with the people of computer science, and working for the Internet or computers. And this is all that I can say.
I know this honor is not for me alone but also for the billions who still do not have the benefit of the Internet. But I accept it and thank everyone on their behalf as well.
The second phase is nobody cared. That’s a really good thing. Because you can actually do engineering work without having grand ambitions or having lots of people, say at other standards organizations, suddenly get interested. They didn’t know what was hitting them.
For developing countries like ours, the Internet is a means of collaborating and access to knowledge all around the world alike.
This is a very great honor and I’m proud, honored, but not so little surprised to be here. But still, even though I’m not a troublemaker, I may well not be an evangelist, but I’m a really really stubborn lady.