The 2001 Draper Prize

The 2001 Charles Stark Draper Prize was awarded to the inventors of the Internet: Drs. Vinton Cerf, Robert Kahn, Leonard Kleinrock, and Lawrence Roberts. They shared a $500,000 honorarium, and each received a gold medal and citation at a ceremony on Feb. 20 during National Engineers Week in Washington, D.C.

Roberts, while working at the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), published the plan for a key forerunner of the Internet, ARPANET, in 1967. The intent was to create a tool to link geographically dispersed research-center computers. Roberts's design incorporated the packet switching concept, published by Kleinrock in 1961. Through packet switching, a message is divided into multiple packets of data that are transmitted individually and can follow different routes to their destination, where they are reassembled in their original order. Kahn contributed significantly to the overall ARPANET architectural design. ARPANET carried its first message in 1969.

To transcend the network-specific boundaries of ARPANET, Kahn championed the idea of open-architecture networking, which would allow for networks of different designs to connect by means of a communications protocol. Kahn teamed up with Cerf to co-invent TCP/IP, which stands for Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol.

Kahn and Roberts discussed their role in the development of the Internet and their predictions for its future at a lecture hosted by Boston's Museum of Science on May 1, 2001.

The Draper Prize was endowed in 1988 by The Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, Inc., of Cambridge, Massachusetts, in memory of its founder and to increase public understanding of the contributions of engineering and technology to society. The prize is awarded annually. It is among the world's largest engineering awards.

Dr. Charles Stark Draper, known as the "father of inertial navigation", led the effort that brought inertial navigation into operational usage in aircraft, missiles, submarines, and space vehicles. He was head of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which later was renamed in his honor and became an independent, not-for-profit corporation in 1973.

For additional information about the Draper Prize, contact the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) awards administrator at 202-334-1237 or visit the NAE Web, or contact Kathleen Granchelli, Communications Director, Draper Laboratory, at 617-258-2605.

The Draper Prize Recipients

Dr. Vinton Cerf is senior vice president of Internet architecture and technology for WorldCom, a major communications and Internet provider. His team of architects and engineers design advanced Internet frameworks for delivering a combination of data, information, voice, and video services for business and consumer use.

Dr. Robert E. Kahn is chair, chief executive officer, and president of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI), Reston, Va., a nonprofit organization that provides leadership and funding for research and development of the National Information Infrastructure (NII). The NII, a term Kahn coined in the 1980s, includes the expanding range of facilities and equipment that transmit, store, process, and display voice, data, and images. Kahn founded CNRI after concluding a 13-year career at DARPA, begun in 1972. Previously, he had worked on the technical staff at Bell Laboratories and became an assistant professor of electrical engineering at MIT. Kahn received his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from City College of New York in 1960; he earned his master's and doctoral degrees from Princeton University in 1962 and 1964 respectively.

Dr. Leonard Kleinrock is professor of computer science, University of California at Los Angeles, and chief executive officer, chair, and founder of Nomadix, an Internet start-up company. He also is chairman of TTI/Vanguard, a technology forum devoted to emerging technologies. He was a founder and the first president of Linkabit Corporation. Among his many honors is an honorary doctorate from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, presented in 2000. Kleinrock holds a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from City College of New York, awarded in 1957. He earned a master's degree and a doctorate, both in electrical engineering, from MIT in 1957 and 1963 respectively.

Dr. Lawrence G. Roberts is the chief technology officer of Caspian Networks, an Internet infrastructure company with headquarters in San Jose, California. After working at ARPA, Roberts founded Telenet, the company that developed the X.25 data protocol. He was chief executive officer from 1973 to 1980. From 1983 to 1993, he was chairman and chief executive officer of NetExpress, an electronics company specializing in packetized FAX and Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) equipment. From 1993 to 1998, he was president of ATM Systems. His bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees are all from MIT.

Press Release
CAMBRIDGE -- The inventors of the Internet have won the 2001 Charles Stark Draper Prize, which is administered by the National Academy of Engineering and endowed by Draper Laboratory, of Cambridge, Mass. Vinton Cerf, Robert Kahn, Leonard Kleinrock, and Lawrence Roberts will share a $500,000 honorarium, and each will receive a gold medal at a ceremony on Feb. 20 during National Engineers Week in Washington, D.C. The Draper Prize honors engineering achievements that benefit human welfare and freedom.

Initially developed as a tool to link research-center computers, the Internet has become a vital instrument of social change, connecting people in 65 countries, and affecting educational pursuits, personal communications, and international economies.

Pioneering technology
Roberts, a former MIT researcher who had joined the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), published the plan for a key forerunner of the Internet, ARPANET, in 1967. Roberts drew on concepts of a global computer network for time-sharing computers proposed in 1962 by J.C.R. Licklider of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who was the first head of computer research projects at ARPA. At that time, a single computer could take up an entire room and was an extremely expensive resource, so the ability to access data or programs on a computer that was located across the country was very attractive.

To make it possible to share data in a timely way, Roberts's design incorporated the packet switching concept. Kleinrock had published the first paper on packet switching theory in 1961, based on his work as a graduate student at MIT. Through packet switching, a message is divided into multiple packets of data that are transmitted individually and can follow different routes to their destination, where they are reassembled in their original order. This was a more efficient method than circuit switching, which used a dedicated line to deliver a single message. ARPANET carried its first message in 1969, from Kleinrock's laboratory at University of California at Los Angeles to Stanford Research Institute.

The first public demonstration of ARPANET was held in 1972. Useful as capabilities like file sharing with remote hosts were, what captured the public imagination was electronic mail. Roberts expanded the basic send-and-read application written by Ray Tomlinson at BBN to list, selectively read, file, forward, and respond to messages. That year also marked a decisive step toward today's Internet, when Kahn championed the idea of open-architecture networking shortly after arriving at DARPA. It would allow for networks of different designs to connect by means of a communications protocol. Together, Cerf and Kahn invented TCP/IP, which stands for Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol; IP handled addressing and forwarding of individual packets, while TCP was concerned with service features such as flow control and recovery from lost packets. TCP/IP was acknowledged as a standard by the mid-1980s.