Networking pioneer Landweber named to Internet Hall of Fame

The decision to put Lawrence Landweber in the "Innovators" circle of the newly-created Internet Hall of Fame is not likely one that cost the nominating committee any sleep. "What's neat about this field is that there is always something new," says Landweber, the University of Wisconsin-Madison emeritus professor of computer sciences. "Everywhere you look you find new, exciting applications opened up by new, exciting technologies." Landweber joined 31 other Internet luminaries — names like Vint Cerf ("Father of the Internet"), Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the World Wide Web) and Ray Tomlinson (he chose the "@" symbol and gave us email) — in the hall's first class of inductees in a ceremony in Geneva. "I'm honored to be in that group," Landweber says. "There are people who actually did the technical work underlying the Internet, people who developed applications for it and people who advocated for its use and made sure it developed the way it has." Landweber and his colleagues at UW-Madison had its feet in several of those camps, creating and nurturing Computer Science Network (CSNET), an early 1980s precursor to the Internet designed to connect researchers in university and private settings. Marvin Solomon (now also a computer science professor emeritus) and research associate Michael Litzkow developed the name server for CSNET, an early example of a distributed directory service to guide network.