I stand here as a representative of number of groups of colleagues. The work that was described was a part of what I did as part of the Indian academic network project called the Education & Research Network, ERNET, funded by the government of India and supported by the United Nations Development Programme.
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I would like to thank the ISOC for honoring my late husband Rolf Nordhagen. Participating in the history of the Internet, he would have been so proud to be recognized in this way.
I would like to say that I was born knowing I was going to be designing protocols. But in fact, if I’d known more about computers when I was young, I would have said I would be happy doing pretty much anything as long as it didn’t involve computers.
My love affair with computing, which became after awhile a love affair with networking, began in the middle 60s when I was a graduate student in business at Stanford. And someone said, “You know, there’s something going on on the west side of campus having to do with computers.”
I spent the first half, let’s say fifteen years of a career, trying to make communications easier. And I thought that was a cool thing; I thought that would be great. I’ve spent roughly the second half, another fifteen years, trying to make communication harder, or at least more selective and safer
I did not invent an important thing. I am not an innovator. The only thing I did is you know, in early 2000, when WiFi was just coming I used a simple indoor router to make a long-range wireless link, a forty-kilometer link, to bring Internet in my home village.
Thanks goes to everybody who helped to spread the technology. Okay, no. There’s one guy I won’t thank, and that’s the one who used a stolen credit card number to buy our software and then spread it claiming it’s free. He did help us, but still I don’t thank him.
In viewing the list of previous and current inductees, one is awestruck just to be included among them. My own contributions in broadband access, particularly DSL, seem somewhat dwarfed by those of the others.
I want to express my thanks to the Internet pioneers who invented the Internet. This is not only beneficial to the people around the world, especially in China. There are more than six hundred million people using the Internet every day.
[Frank Heart] said that the thing he most remembers about building the early ARPANET was it was really an amazing effort by a few people. It shows what can happen when you put together a very talented group of focused people, and they can really accomplish an amazing amount of things.