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Many people have shaped networking architecture and the Internet design. To bring them back together and to challenge their viewpoints about past and future developments with the ideas of next generations, is one of NetAffair aims. Doing so we are supported by an exclusive board which, over a couple of years by now, are keeping their faith in our work and are listening as well as pointing us in different directions. Needless to say, we are thankful and are learning a lot by having them around.

Board of Supporters

Louis Pouzin: Eurolinc, Cyclades Network, today he works on the Open Root Project
Vint Cerf: Google, TCP/IP co-designer, ACM President 2012-2014
Tony Rutkowski: ITU-T Global Cybersecurity Rapporteur, ETSI LI Technical Committee eWarrant Rapporteur, Netmagic Association LLC
Ben Segal: CERN IT Department, retired. He was involved in satellite projects as Stella as well as a mentor of Tim Berners-Lee
Kai Jakobs: RWTH Aachen University, Computer Science Department, European Academy for Standardization
Peter Rastl: ACOnet, Vienna University Computer Centre (ZID), retired. He once chaired the Ebone consortium and brought the Internet to Austria

Further insight was provided so far by (in alphabetical order)

Maurice Allègre: From 1968 to 1974 in charge of French government policy for the development of the computer industry and the use of computers in society, he was involved in the coming about of UNIDATA and in the 1970s member of the French Délégation à l’Informatique in Brussels.
Derek Barber: joined the UK post Office Engineering Department in 1946 where, as he recalls, has worked on coaxial cable transmission. At NPL he was part of the team of Donald Davies and became appointed director of the COST 11 European Informatics Network in 1971.
Rob Blokzijl: founding member of Réseaux IP Européens (RIPE), the European open forum for IP networking. He also served on board of ICANN and is an active and critical voice within the community.
Carl Cargill,: today standards principal at Adobe Systems. He was invovled in the ISO/OSI affair, was setting Standards at Netscape, Sun and DEC and has served on Board of W3C.
Dai Davies: was involved in the ISDN development, worked at Deutsche Telekom as well as British Telecom, Director of the COSINE project management unit on EuropaNET, and until recently he was general manager of DANTE.
Howard Davies: worked at CERNET in the 1970s, director of the Interim COSINE project management unit and vice president of RARE. In 1993 he became general manager from DANTE (until 2001). Together with Beatrice Bressan he published the book “A History of International Research Networking”, 2010.
John Day: has been involved in the design of transport and upper layer protocols for the ARPANET as well as the Internet. He has developed and designed protocols. In 2009 he co-founded the Pouzin Society. One line he is well known for and which can be found in his book “Patterns in Network Architecture” goes like this: “If the Internet were an operating system it would have more in common with DOS than Unix”.
Ann Duenki: Consultant, “Donna Informatica”: worked on the EIN Node at ETH Zürich in the 1970s and on virtual terminal definitions and protocols, together with Pietro Schicker.
Michael Haberler: member of the founding team of the first commercial Internet provider in Austria, EUnet.
Charles Herzfeld: became ARPA/DARPA Chief 1965 – 1967. He signed the first check for the Arpanet in 1966 to support Robert Taylor to make J.C.R. Lickliders dream come true.
Elizabeth Feinler, Jake: managed the documentations for the ARPANET and the WHOIS server. Doug Engelbart brought the biochemist per training to computer networking.
Dennis Jennings: was member of the ICANN board, has been responsible for the decisions that created NSFNET (1985/86) while working for the US Federal Government. He was actively involved in the start-up of research networks in the Europe (EARN - President; Ebone – Board member) and Ireland (HEAnet).Today he is involved in the internationalization of domain names.
Bob Kahn: CNRI: He was responsible for the system design of the Arpanet and wrote together with Vint Cerf the TCP specification in 1974. He was trying to solve with TCP/IP global addressing in a multi-network environment. More recently he developed and promotes the Handle System, a general purpose distributed information system.
Tomaz Kalin: Is currently serving on the Board of Directors of Telecom Slovenia. He was a member of the Management Committee of COST 11 Program (European Informatics Network), and project leader of the successor project COST 11bis. Director of the “Jozef Stefan” Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia (IJS). He was involved in the establishment of DANTE and is a founding member of the Internet Society.
Daniel Karrenberg: chief scientist RIPE NCC: In the 1980s Daniel helped to build EUnet, a European mail and news network. In particular he led the effort to transition EUnet to Internet protocols, making it the first pan-European ISP.
Peter Kirstein: University College London. He set up the link to the Arpanet in the UK in 1973. Since then he has been involved in setting up global Internet operation in the Southern Caucasus and Central Asia regions.
Leonard Kleinrock: pioneered the mathematical theory of packet networks. He allowed that the first host at the ARPANET was called SEX (at least he didn´t forbid it), and still loves his sweet 1963 Chevy Impala Super Sport Convertible, in which he transported many of those early Internet pioneers all over Southern California.
Ken Krechmer: Lecturer, Interdisciplinary Telecommunications Program, University of Colorado. He participated in the development of the International Telecommunications Union Recommendations for Group 3 Facsimile, data modems, digital subscriber line transceivers and US cellular standards. Taught the only US graduate course on standards in an engineering college.
Larry Landweber: Emeritus of Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been involved in the development of the international Internet. In 1979, he proposed CSNET, was senior advisor to the US National Science Foundation and helped to bring alive GENI (Global Environment for Network Innovations).
Stephen J. Lukasik: Head of Darpa from 1970 - 1975, secured funding for the development of ARPANET. He wrote down his viewpoints in an interesting read: “Why the ARPANET was built”, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, vol. 33, no. 3, pp. 4-21, July-September, 2011.
Robin Mansell: served as Head of the Department of Media and Communications 2006-2009 and is Department Exam Sub-Board Chair at London School of Economics and Political Science from January 2012. She is concerned with the development of global networks and electronic services, serves as a consultant to ministries of governments and to leading companies in the information and communication technology field.
Hermann Maurer: developed in the 1980s together with his team in Graz, Styria, “Mupid”; the Austrian version of the UK “Prestel System”, which holds another twist to the story of early European computer networks for communication and services.
Larry Roberts: Virtually forced to join IPTO, ARPA by Charles Herzfeld in the late 1960s. In the 1970s, Roberts founded the commercial packet data communications carrier Telenet. He wrote the draft X.25 and successfully lobbied for it. X.25 became an ITU-T standard in 1976. More recently he is CEO and Founder of Anagran, a California-based start-up that offers high-capacity flow management products for networks.
Peter H. Salus: is a technological historian who was born in Vienna. Among his books are “A Quarter Century of UNIX”, “Casting the Net”, “The ARPANET Sourcebook: The Unpublished Foundations of the Internet”. Peter H. Salus has served as Executive Director of USENIX and The Sun User Group and Vice President of the Free Software Foundation.
Pietro Schicker: was technical responsible for the EIN-Node Switzerland, where he had to deal with the decisions made by the Swiss PTT and its management board. He was involved in several working groups at ITU-T and ETSI.
Peter Paul Sint: worked for the Austrian Academy of Science, and in the 1970s and 1980s he was an observer at IASA, Laxenburg.He was co-editor of the study “Grenzüberschreitender Datenfluß und Österreich”.1986.
Hermann Steinringer: was involved in laying out the infrastructure of ACOnet, the Austrian National Science Network (NREN), yet also in connecting the East with the West, by helping out with his deep inside in networking infrastructure. If you want to know which cable under which drain cover in Vienna belongs to whom, he is the right person to ask for.
Andrew S. Tanenbaum: A true educator, working at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. He wrote the first available scholarly handbook about “Computer Networks” and, as an American in Europe, he knows about the difference in tempi and developments. He told us about UNIX as well as the Datakit® Virtual Circuit Switch and the Spider ring network, developed by Alexander G. (Sandy) Fraser.
Fouad A. Tobagi: Stanford School of Engineering, works on network control mechanism for handling multimedia traffic. He once took the time to tell our interviewer in length the wireless part to the story.
Hubert Zimmermann: worked in the team of Louis Pouzin, Cyclades, EIN, and chaired the OSI Architecture committee at the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Later, at UDcast he did software for satellite aware IP networks and IPTV on mobile. Hubert Zimmermann died on the 9th of November 2012.
Werner Zorn: was involved in the development of networks in Germany. He took the lead in the newly founded Computing Centre of the University Karlsruhe in 1971. Didn't believe in OSI but in the use of TCP/IP. He oversaw early networking cooperation with China.