Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn have won the prestigious Turing Award for inventing the basic communications protocols that allow millions of Internet users around the world to send e-mail, listen to music online and flash instant messages.
Cerf and Kahn share the $100,000 prize for developing TCP/IP. The networking design is so simple that computers in diverse environments can talk seamlessly with one another. That simplicity also allows other innovators to create complex applications like the World Wide Web and video conferencing on top of it.
The award is given by the Association for Computing Machinery, one of the leading organizations for computing professionals.
"This was a big surprise to both of us," Cerf said in an e-mail. "Historically, the Turing Award has gone to giants in the computer science community whose ideas have shaped the course of software and hardware development and use. Networking has not been a focus until this award."
In a statement from his office, Kahn called the award "a wonderful recognition of work we had done, which was built upon by so many others over many years."