Internet has completely revolutionised information transfer processes, and has ushered in unrestricted, worldwide information flow. The momentous research and development programme behind it has been led by a range of researchers and research teams who have applied their great vision of the future to turn what years ago was Utopia into a tangible reality by designing and setting up the protocols, the technology needed for link-up, and the access services to bring all this about. The work of Lawrence Roberts, Robert Kahn, Vinton Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee is in this sense a major step forward for the benefit of mankind.

Lawrence G Roberts was born in 1937 in Connecticut, USA; he spearheaded the systematizing of formulas for routing and locating servers on data networks. He was also CEO of Telenet, the first packet data communications carrier, which went on to develop the X25 Protocol that became the basis of the EUNet European network. He is now the president of Caspian Networks, one of the United State's premier applied research centres.