2024 IEEE Medal of Honor Goes to Bob Kahn | Hacker News Reader

2024 IEEE Medal of Honor Goes to Bob Kahn

spectrum.ieee.org

99 pointssohkamyung41 comments

Long overdue! It should not have taken this long to officially recognize his contributions.

"Kids" nowadays don't even know of the true "Greats" who made The Internet as it is today, possible (they have forgotten "standing on the shoulders of giants"). I always point folks to the classic early-1990s Internet System Handbook by Daniel Lynch and Marshall Rose which explains the then Internet Architecture with chapters written by the greats like Jon Postel, Vint Cerf, Van Jacobsen etc.

> It should not have taken this long to officially recognize his contributions.

His contributions have been officially recognized many times before, this is not the first time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Kahn - check out the list of awards. 13 in all over the last 30 years including this one. He received the Turing Award in 2004 with Vint Cerf and also the IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal in 1997.

Yes, of course; i meant why this one took so long.

Because it's a career achievement award. Look at the other people who have received it and when, in their lives, they received it. It's also a bit of a broader category of award than the IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal he received 3 decades ago which is for the field of telecommunications. Vint Cerf only received it last year himself. It also looks like it's not awarded to more than one person at a time, and it's only awarded annually, so that limits the number of people who could ever possibly receive it quite a bit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_Medal_of_Honor

Agreed; but sometimes it just feels like these award committees have no sense of timing and it often appears like a case of "too little too late". Awards should be given as soon as a person's discoveries/inventions have been validated and when people are still aware of them to make an impact on public consciousness.

It is exactly what it is. The internet of today also wouldn’t look the way it looks without the incredibly valuable contributions built atop the foundation. I wouldn’t look too harshly at a carpenter for not constantly acknowledging that their house frame would be a whole lot less useful if not for the concrete slab underneath it. Whilst I certainly respect the names you mention, we can’t pretend that the Internet of today is as it was in their imaginations. The Internet is the world’s largest collaborative project and is exactly the sum of its parts. The design envisaged by these people is exactly why no one person or small group of people really deserve to be put on such a high pedestal.

> The design envisaged by these people is exactly why no one person or small group of people really deserve to be put on such a high pedestal.

You have missed the point. The things we take for granted today started small and evolved from there; we have merely added a lot of superstructure to the underlying bedrock foundations envisaged by these select pioneers. All the application layer protocols and technologies utilizing them can be replaced as the fad changes (eg. distributed Objects vs. distributed web) but these core concepts/ideas/technologies will always remain and hence needs to be acknowledged. The situation is analogous to the building of great Architectural Marvels; even though a lot of folks with different skill sets are actually responsible for the manifestation, it is usually the "Architect(s)" who are credited with the achievement because it is the keeping of the holistic design together through its evolution is what is actually the key.

Your analogy doesn't make any sense, and "Whilst I certainly respect the names you mention" is faint praise kinda like "You have ten cats? Wow, it only smells like five or six!"

Maxwell didn't envision electric guitars, either. That doesn't mean Les Paul is equal to him.

Even by your analogy though, GP’s concept makes sense. I would cringe if an old guy at a music store started rambling about how kids these days with their fancy electric guitar don’t even respect the great Lord Maxwell, without whom we wouldn’t understand electromagnetism enough to make an electric guitar.

Even by your cringey explanation, GP's "concept" (as you call it) is stupid.

We honor the people who first develop something, because, by definition, they're out there without much, if any support. Improving something once it's there is much easier and safer. If you fail, hey -- the original thing is still there.

On the other hand, if you're the type to whom everything is obvious once you see it, then I can understand how it might all seem equal to you.

Well deserved. Congratulations, Bob!

Kahn!!!!

Is the IEEE still relevant today? I would say arxiv is publishing more relevant research

The IEEE is the professional society of electrical engineers, and designs many important standards.

Arxiv is pre-publishing, not publishing. Much as I wish the death of Elsevier, this is an important distinction for us to maintain, as we all found out during the LK-99 superconductor craze.

There is plenty of fake crap that’s published too. Publishing is really not that big of an improvement over Arxiv. Ask working scientists.

It's a question of volume of crap. Just because garbage makes it through the filter doesn't mean the filter isn't doing anything.

As for asking working scientists, working scientists were warning caution during the LK-99 debacle partially by reminding people that it hadn't even been published yet.

I think these are still relevant.

- IEEE 802.3: Ethernet

- IEEE 802.11: Wi-Fi

- IEEE 802.15.1: Bluetooth

- IEEE 802.1Q: VLANs

- IEEE 1588: Precision Time Protocol

- IEEE 802.3af/at/bt: Power over Ethernet

Also:

- IEEE 754: floating-point arithmetic

IEEE Std 1003 (POSIX) is pretty relevant to many people here.

There is also IEEE 802.1AS, a specific PTP profile for 802.x networks.

As a standards body at least, very much relevant.

Since I didn't find this readily available,

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronics engineering, electrical engineering, and other related disciplines.

(from Wikipedia)

I feel like the Wikipedia article understates the reach of IEEE:

- Produces 30 percent of the world’s published literature in electrical engineering, computers and control technology.

- Holds annually more than 300 major conferences.

- Has nearly 900 active standards with 700 under development.

https://umaine.edu/ieee/what-is-ieee/

I would hope the vast majority of HN readers know what the IEEE is!

https://xkcd.com/1053/

Don’t make fun of the kids for being kids.

I hope so too since my simple definition was downvoted into invisibility.

Serious question, with respect. What is your profession? I think that some acronyms, like NASA, need no explanation. In Vanity Fair I would expect IEEE to be explained, but not on HN. For what it's worth I don't work with hardware or electronics now am I an engineer nor do I live in the US. The IEEE is still a very well known acronym among my peers.

Maybe the point was that IEEE is a non-profit, so the award is about honor, not monetary amount.

Is that what 501 means? I think had such an explanation been the goal, then it could have been stated explicitly.

Though maybe in GP's field the term 501 is as commonly known as I think that IEEE is in mine. ))

Yes, 501(c)(3) is an easily recognizable (for Americans) reference to a non-profit organization, named so after the section of the tax code.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/1/501c3-organizations.asp

Funnily enough, my brain still associates IEEE with ethernet, or networking in general. I know what it is, but I think the first few times I read the term was on some network config view in an old Windows version, probably next to some protocol selector. Now whenever I see IEEE, my brain loads a picture of a network config page, or an ethernet cable & port.

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