How the Queen of England Beat Everyone to the Internet

Summary

Peter Kirstein is the man who put the Queen of England on the internet. In 1976.That's Her Majesty in the photo above, and if the year isn't immediately obvious from the computer terminal she's typing on -- or from her attire -- you can find it on the wall, just to her left, printed on one of the signs trumpeting the arrival of the ARPANET.The date was March 26, 1976, and the ARPANET -- the computer network that eventually morphed into the internet -- had just come to the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment, a telecommunications research center in Malvern, England. The Queen was on hand to christen the connection, and in the process, she became one of the first heads of state to send an e-mail.It was Peter Kirstein who set up her mail account, choosing the username "HME2." That's Her Majesty, Elizabeth II. "All she had to do was press a couple of buttons," he remembers, "and her message was sent."Kirstein's role in the first royal e-mail was only appropriate. He's also the man who first brought the ARPANET to Great Britain, setting up a network node at the University of London in 1973. Throughout the '70s and on into the '80s, he would oversee Britain's presence on ARPANET and help push this sprawling research network onto the all-important TCP/IP protocols that gave rise to the worldwide internet as we know it today.This past April, in recognition of his dogged pursuit of internetworking in Great Britain -- if not his deft choice of royal usernames -- Kirstein was inducted into the Internet Society's (ISOC) Internet Hall of Fame. Part of the hall's inaugural class, he was joined by such names as Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn and Tim Berners-Lee.Kirstein grew up in Britain. He studied mathematics and engineering at Cambridge and the University of London. And after completing his PhD, he was a researcher with General Electric in Zurich, Switzerland. But over the years, he also spent quite a bit of time at Stanford University and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCL...