The Internet History and its Flexible Future

Dr. Leonard Kleinrock
University of California, Los Angeles

Thursday, March 12, 2009
3:00 PM – Salvatori Auditorium (SAL 101) Lecture
4:00 PM – Salvatori Auditorium (SAL 101) Reception

In this presentation we discuss the history and future of the Internet. The early work on packet switching is traced and then a brief description of the critical events in the growth of the Internet is given. We will present a vision of where the Internet is heading with a focus on the edge where user participation, flexible applications and services, and innovation are appearing. We foresee a network with extreme mobility, ubiquity, personalization, adaptivity, video addiction and surprising applications as yet unimagined.

Dr. Leonard Kleinrock developed the mathematical theory of packet networks, the technology underpinning the Internet, while a graduate student at MIT. This was in the period 1960-1962, nearly a decade before the birth of the Internet which occurred in his laboratory when his Host computer at UCLA became the first node of the Internet in September 1969. He wrote the first paper and published the first book on the subject; he also directed the transmission of the first message ever to pass over the Internet. He was listed by the Los Angeles Times in 1999 as among the `50 People Who Most Influenced Business This Century’. He was also listed as among the 33 most influential living Americans in the December 2006 Atlantic Monthly. Kleinrock’s work was further recognized when he received the 2007 National Medal of Science, the highest honor for achievement in science bestowed by the President of the United States.

Leonard Kleinrock received his Ph.D. from MIT in 1963. He has served as a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Los Angeles since then, serving as Chairman of the department from 1991-1995. He received his BEE degree from CCNY in 1957 and his MS degree from MIT in 1959. He also received Honorary Doctorates from CCNY in 1997, from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 2000, from the University of Bologna in 2005, from Politecnico di Turino in 2005 and from the University of Judaism in 2007. He was the first President and Co-founder of Linkabit Corporation, the company that spawned numerous wireless spinoffs in San Diego. He is Co-founder and Chairman of Nomadix, Inc., a high-technology firm located in Southern California. He is also Founder and Chairman of TTI/Vanguard, an advanced technology forum organization based in Santa Monica, California. He has published approximately 250 papers and authored six books on a wide array of subjects including packet switching networks, packet radio networks, local area networks, broadband networks, gigabit networks, nomadic computing, performance evaluation, and peer-to-peer networks. During his tenure at UCLA, Dr. Kleinrock has supervised the research for 47 Ph.D. students and numerous M.S. students. These former students now form a core group of the world’s most advanced networking experts. A number are full professors at leading universities, and many are associated with major research firms in the area of computer-communications.

Dr. Kleinrock is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an IEEE fellow, an ACM fellow, an INFORMS Fellow, an IEC fellow, a Guggenheim fellow and a founding member of the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Research Council. Among his many honors, he is the recipient of the L.M. Ericsson Prize, the NAE Charles Stark Draper Prize, the Marconi International Fellowship Award, the Okawa Prize, the IEEE Internet Millennium Award, the ORSA Lanchester Prize, the ACM SIGCOMM Award, the NEC Computer and Communcations Award, the Sigma Xi Monie A. Ferst Award, the CCNY Townsend Harris Medal, the CCNY Electrical Engineering Award, the UCLA Outstanding Faculty Member Award, the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award, the UCLA Faculty Research Lecturer, the INFORMS Presidents Award, the ICC Prize Paper Award, the IEEE Leonard G. Abraham Prize Paper Award and the IEEE Harry M. Goode Award.

Published on September 27th, 2016Last updated on August 2nd, 2023