USENIX, the association of UNIX users, has presented its 1995 Lifetime Achievement Award to Tom Truscott, Steve Bellovin, and Jim Ellis, for their work in creating USENET, the Internet's electronic bulletin board.
USENET was announced 15 years ago at the USENIX conference in Boulder, CO, as an experiment to create an electronic means to facilitate the posting and reading of news messages and notices. USENET was expected to be the official network of USENIX, formerly the UNIX User's Group, when originally proposed. Although the primary class of traffic was expected to be UNIX bug reports, that quickly expanded. Today there are more than 5,000 discussion groups, known as newsgroups, on a wide variety of subjects, tens of thousands of USENET sites, and over two and a half million participants.
The recipients of this award, known as "Keepers of the Flame," receive an original glass sculpture called "The Flame." This year's award also honors the thousands of participants who have contributed to USENET over the years.
The award was first presented in 1993 to The Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG), honoring 180 persons for their contributions to the CSRG effort in producing the Berkeley UNIX releases. The wide availability of the BSD networking code is often cited as a major contributor to the success of the TCP/IP protocol and the resulting explosive growth of the Internet.
In 1994 the award was given to Michael Lesk for inventing UUCP, and Van Jacobsen for his work on making TCP more robust.