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I
IBM (International Business Machines) Corporation
IMP (Interface Message Processor)
Index Medicus
Information
Information Management, A Proposal
Insulator
Integrated Circuit
Internet
Internet Service Provider (ISP)
Internet Society

 K
Kahn, Robert (1938- )
Kasson, Gunnar
Key
Kiley, Ma (1880-1971)
Kleinrock, Leonard (1934- )
Klima, John

 L
Lederberg, Joshua (1925-)
Licklider, J. C. R. (1915-1990)
Lindberg, Donald A. B. (1933- )
Lineman
Local Area Network (LAN)



Ipop up close


IBM (International Business Machines) Corporation
A leading manufacturer of computer equipment and a leading software developer. IBM became the largest and most influential computer manufacturer in the world in the 1950s, in large part because it won the contract to design and build the computers for the SAGE air defense system.

IMP (Interface Message Processor)
Computer used in the ARPANET to translate and route messages across the network. Ancestor of today's routers.

Index Medicus
Index to articles appearing in the world's leading medical journals, created by the National Library of Medicine in 1879. Updates to the Index Medicus rapidly became a physician's best guide to the current medical literature. Superseded by MEDLARS and MEDLINE.

Information
In computer science and telecommunications, a crucial concept used to refer to data that can be communicated in some manner. Strictly speaking, information refers to the data necessary to reconstruct a message at another place or time, not to the content of that message; information is thus not to be confused with knowledge or meaning. Information is measured in "bits."

Information Management, A Proposal
Paper: "Information Management, A Proposal"

Author: Berners-Lee, Tim

Computer scientist who invented the World Wide Web by creating a set of protocols for managing information on the Internet. These protocols included a language for displaying documents on different computers (HTML, the Hyper-Text Markup Language), a system for referring to documents stored on networked computers (URL, the Uniform Resource Locator), and a program for finding and displaying documents (the first browser).

Insulator
A material that does not conduct electricity. In telegraphy, the term usually refers to a bulbous glass object that attaches to the top of a telegraph pole and which holds the conducting wire (which in the 19th century was often bare, uncovered by cloth or rubber insulation).

Integrated Circuit
An integrated circuit, or chip, contains all the component elements of a circuit in one solid unit (as opposed to connecting them via wires). Integrated circuits today are typically made from silicon and other semiconductors. A microprocessor is a special type of integrated circuit.

Internet
A network of computer networks linked physically and by the shared use of the Internet Protocol (the IP part of TCP/IP).

Internet Service Provider (ISP)
An ISP is an organization, such as America Online, that provides access to the Internet.

Internet Society
An organization that develops technical standards for the Internet.


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Kahn, Robert (1938- )
Computer scientist best known as co-author (with Vinton Cerf) of the TCP/IP protocols for inter-network communication.

Paper: "A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication" with Vint Cerf

Kasson, Gunnar
Owner of Balto the dog; leader of the team that finished the final leg of the dog-sled relay that brought vitally needed diphtheria antitoxin over 700 miles from Nenana to Nome, Alaska in the bitter arctic winter of 1925.

Key
In telegraphy, a sending device used to tap out messages in Morse code.

Kiley, Ma (1880-1971)
A female railroad telegrapher. Born Mattie Collins Brite, in 1880, in Atacosa County, Texas, Ma Kiley worked as a telegraph operator for 40 years in remote locales that ranged from northern Mexico to Saskatchewan, Canada. Along the way, she married five times, and had two children (one of whom died tragically at age two). The name "Ma Kiley" derived from her third husband, John Kiley, and served as a pen name for a series of autobiographical articles entitled "The Bug and I," published in 1950 in Railroad Magazine.

Kleinrock, Leonard (1934- )
Computer scientist who developed the theory of packet-switching, the fundamental new idea underlying computer networking.

Klima, John
Artist known for creating dynamic, computer-based representations of numerical information.


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Lederberg, Joshua (1925-)
Medical researcher who won the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1958 for his work on bacterial genetics. Since the 1960s he has been a pioneer in the use of computers and computer networking for biomedical research.

Licklider, J. C. R. (1915-1990)
Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider was a psychologist interested in how humans interacted with machines — and in how humans could use machines to interact with each other. In his work on SAGE and at the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), "Lick" encouraged people to think of computers as tools for communication and collaboration.

Papers: "The Computer as a Communications Device" "Man-Computer Symbiosis"

Lindberg, Donald A. B. (1933- )
Pioneer in the use of computers and telecommunications in medicine and current director of the National Library of Medicine. Played a key role in leading the federal government's efforts to improve the nation's computing and communications resources as founding director of the National Coordinating office for High Performance Computing and Communications from 1992-1995.

Lineman
In telegraphy, a person who puts up and repairs telegraph wires.

Local Area Network (LAN)
A network of personal computers or workstations, typically connected by Ethernet or similar technologies. A local area network typically does not use packet-switching or IP to transmit messages within itself, though it does use them to transmit messages across the Internet.


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First published: 23 October 2001
Last updated: 11 August 2009
Date Archived: 04 January 2012
Metadata | Permanence level: Permanent: Stable Content