Ben M. Segal

Dr. Segal graduated in Physics and Mathematics in 1958 from Imperial College London, then worked for 7 years on fast breeder reactor development, first for the UK Atomic Energy Authority and later in the USA for the Detroit Edison Company. He has been at CERN since 1971, after finishing his Ph.D. at Stanford University in Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering.

Except for a sabbatical in 1977, when he worked at Bell Northern Research in Palo Alto on a PABX development project (and encountered Unix for the first time), CERN has kept hi pretty busy on various projects, including the coordinated introduction of the Internet Protocols at CERN beginning in 1985 (see: "A Short History of Internet Protocols at CERN"). For more details on his work, see his CV and some associated Notes, together with a partial List of Publications.

For a little more historical reading, take a look at his recent book review of the newly published book "How the Web Was Born" by James Gillies and Robert Cailliau. Yes, the World Wide Web was invented at CERN and this book tells the story very truthfully.

Another recent article of historical interest is on the project "SHIFT", which changed the way computing is done at CERN- from using mainframes to Unix clusters and now Linux PC's. Very recently, this project was selected as the winner in the Science category in the 2001 Computerworld Honors awards. CERN was nominated for this award by Larry Ellison of Oracle Corporation.

Over the past 15 years, he has taught courses on Unix, distributed computing and Internet protocols in many places outside CERN, both in "developing" countries (e.g. China, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Russia, Venezuela, Cuba) and not-so-developing ones (Italy, Sweden, UK, etc.). Dr. Segal's interest in teaching outside CERN began in 1986 in association with the Trieste International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), which has supported research by developing country scientists since 1964.

As a member of the Internet Society (ISOC), he participated in setting up the ISOC Geneva Chapter in 1995. He also set up its Development Special Interest Group ("Geneva DevSIG") to assist developing country access to the Internet. You can read the recorded Minutes of more than 50 DevSIG monthly meetings which have been held since that time.

In the 1997 election for members of the ISOC Board of Trustees, Dr. Segal was elected as a Trustee and took office that June for a 3-year term. Apart from this work, he helped his colleagues in ISOC Geneva to organize the 1998 annual ISOC Conference INET'98, which was held in Geneva in July 1998. His particular interest was local coordination of the INET'98 Network Technology Workshops; these occur the week before each INET conference and offer Internet training to about 200 people selected by ISOC as best fitted to spread Internet technology internationally.