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.
Archive (Page 14 of 14)
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.
I guess I’m supposed to say how historic things happen, but what I’d like to do is actually paraphrase a comment that is fairly traditional in mathematics and was first taught to me by Dick Hamming, that I have done good things (I’m paraphrasing) because I’ve stood on the shoulders of great people that preceded me.
Barry had a remarkable ability to bring together diverse people, organizations, to help make decisions and the plans that became the Internet as we know it today.
CERN is a place where we try and understand where the universe comes from. And to do that we need technology. This is why we developed the Web.
So, thirty years ago if you wanted to get a new computer and use it you had to surrender your freedom by installing a user-subjugating proprietary operating system. So I decided to fix that by developing another operating system and make it free, and it’s called GNU, but most the time you’ll hear people erroneously calling it Linux.