Unsung internet pioneer awarded society's distinguished fellowship.

This article reports that Peter Kirstein an unsung hero in the international development of the Internet has been made the 24th BCS distinguished fellow. Kirstein, director of research and professor of computer communications systems at University College London (UCL) and a BCS fellow, has been involved with the development of the Internet since the early 1970's. The impact of the web on everyday life would be a pale shadow of what one see today without his relentless pursuit of connectivity outside the U.S. In the 1970's the goal was to interconnect computers in Great Britain and Europe to the emerging US Arpanet. This led to the idea of a concatenation of networks run over the wide area, including the Satnet Atlantic packet satellite network, the Arpanet and others. However, administrative and security problems caused by interconnecting multi-agency networks in the 1980's led to the need for policy control of routes and to the development of BGP, the protocol used to interconnect all the world's Internet service providers. UCL contributed to the development of BGP.