Douglas Comer
lorenetworking
The Purdue professor who wrote the books that taught a generation how the internet actually works.
His citation is worth reading carefully, because of what it honours. A hall of fame otherwise full of people who invented protocols admitted someone for EXPLAINING them: the first series of textbooks setting out the scientific principles under the design, and the earliest formal guidance for building things that use it. The three volumes appeared in 1987 and went into sixteen languages. He did plenty besides - an original Internet Architecture Board member, an early network offering connections before ISPs existed, Cisco's first head of research - but the record puts the teaching first. One detail measures what those editions spanned: the first was written when the internet connected about five thousand computers, and by the fourth it was over fifty-six million. The same book, revised across four orders of magnitude of the thing it described.
Also known as: comer, internetworking with tcp/ip, xinu
Sources
- Internet Hall of Fame: as one of the earliest TCP/IP and internetworking researchers, Comer wrote the first series of textbooks explaining the scientific principles underlying the design of the internet and its protocols; the three-volume Internetworking with TCP/IP, written in 1987, is widely considered the authoritative reference, and played a key role in popularising internet protocols by making them understandable to a new generation of engineers
- Purdue: Comer was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame on 27 September 2019; he joined the Purdue faculty in 1976, taught internet principles to thousands of engineers and IT staff, pioneered the use of tunnelling, created an early network supplying internet connections years before ISPs and the NSFNET backbone, and served as Cisco's first VP of Research between 2003 and 2009
- Publisher biography: an original member of the Internet Architecture Board, former chairman of the DARPA Distributed Systems Architecture Board and the CSNET Technical Committees; the Internetworking series has been translated into 16 languages. The fourth edition notes the internet connected 4.8 million computers when the third was written, up from 5,000 at the first edition, and over 56 million by the fourth