What Is Leonard Kleinrock?

If you ask Leonard Kleinrock his greatest accomplishment, he'll tell you it was the first to send a message online. That might sound like a fairly standard answer from someone who has made many significant contributions to computer science. When you hear how he did it by getting his host computer in his UCLA laboratory connected to ARPANET, which then linked that machine up with other computers at other universities, you might start to understand why he thinks it's so significant. In 1969, Kleinrock and his team worked on building a network of computers that could communicate with each other no matter where they were located. They called this new system "ARPANET," It was one of the very first systems built for what would become known as "the internet. " Kleinrock's team got their host computer connected to ARPANET, which allowed them to send messages between other machines on different campuses around the country and eventually worldwide! It was groundbreaking then; nobody had seen anything like this before! And Kleinrock played a crucial role in making it happen. He is a rock star. He's received so many awards that it's hard to keep them all straight, but here's an abbreviated list: the National Medal of Science, the United States' highest scientific honor, in 2007; the Dan David Prize in 2010; induction into the Internet Hall of Fame by the Internet Society in 2012; and induction into IEEE-Eta Kappa Nu as an Eminent Member in 2011. In 2014, he was awarded the ACM SIGMOBILE Outstanding Contribution Award for his seminal contributions to internet theory and development, and in 2015 he shared the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award for his work on internet theory and action. The guy is just plain brilliant—so much so that it almost seems like he's from another planet (which ISN'T TRUE).