Pingsta's Inaugural Hall of Fame Members

The National Science Foundation recently launched a decade-by-decade documentary flash video titled NSF and the Birth of the Internet - which details the incremental growth of the Internet from its humble beginnings of early Univac 9200 computers with only 8KB of memory to today’s supercomputers, fully narrated by the front line engineers themselves.

Below are the major milestones that led to the birth of the Internet;

1. Concept of networked computers began in the early 1960s at MIT

2. DoD Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA now known as DARPA) took over networking research in 1962.

3. In 1969, ARPANET launched a 4-node INTERNETwork connecting SRI (Palo Alto), UCLA, UCSB & University of Utah

4. At 10:30pm on October 29, 1969 Charlie Klein (at UCLA) and Bill Duval (at SRI in Palo Alto) sent the first Internet computer-to-computer message – The intention was to type “L-O-G" but only "LO" made it across before the remote device crashed.

5. 1972 - The first email was sent.

6. July 1987 - The modern Internet is born from NSFNet

7. July 1, 1988 – The T1 backbone went live, IBM with the Nodes, MCI with the links and Merit made it all work - growth rate was about 20% per month.

8. Aug 6, 1991 - Tim Berners-Lee of CERN launches the first website.

9. 1997 - NSFNet is decommissioned and Network Solutions was contracted to manage domain name registration.

10. Today, 2008 - Over 2 billion people are online with excess of 500 million devices - not including laptops, servers and PDAs which probably add another 1+ billion devices.

One of Pingsta’s core objectives is to celebrate all those that have helped to create (and continue to sustain) the Internet. As such, It is with great pleasure that Pingsta hereby honors the following fifty extraordinary engineers by bestowing upon them the inaugural Pingsta Hall of Fame membership for their various contributions to the development of the Internet;

1. Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider (1915 - 1990)
2. Ivan Edward Sutherland
3. Donald Watts Davies (1924 - 2000)
4. Paul Baran
5. Leonard Kleinrock
6. Robert W. Taylor
7. Lawrence G. Roberts
8. Charley Klein
9. Jon Postel (1943 - 1998)
10. Vint Cerf
11. Robert Elliot Khan
12. Dave Walden
13. Douglas C. Engelbart
14. Dan Murphy
15. George O. Strawn
16. Doug Gale
17. John Connolly
18. Gordon Gallup
19. Eric M. Aupperle
20. Hans-Werner Braun
21. Stephen Wolff
22. Ira Richer
23. Jane Caviness
24. Karen Sandberg
25. William Yeager
26. Andy Bechtolsheim
27. Tom Rindfleisch
28. Les Earnest
29. Len Bosack
30. Sandra Lerner
31. Kirk Lougheed
32. Jeff Mogul
33. Bill Nowicki
34. Benjy Levy
35. Philip Almquist
36. Greg Satz
37. Noel Chiappa
38. Robert Metcalfe
39. David Reeves Boggs
40. Chuck Thacker
41. Butler Lampson
42. Tim Berners-Lee
43. Robert Cailliau
44. Marc Andreessen
45. Eric Bina
46. Larry Smarr
47. Paul Mockapetris
48. Bill Joy
49. Ken Thompson
50. Dennis Ritchie

Please join Pingsta in saluting these exceptional individuals for their contribution to the development of mankind.

Sincerely
Peter Alfred-Adekeye
CEO, Pingsta