Data Communications Specialist Van Jacobson to Receive 2001 ACM SIGCOMM Award; Credited With Algorithms Which Kept the Internet From Congestion Collapse.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

NEW YORK & MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 24, 2001

Van Jacobson, the man widely credited with saving the Internet from an otherwise inevitable congestion collapse in the late 1980s, has been named the 2001 recipient of the ACM SIGCOMM Award. Jacobson is chief scientist at networking startup Packet Design, LLC.

The award is given annually by the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group in Data Communications (ACM SIGCOMM) to a recipient with a long and distinguished history of contributing to the field of data communications. Jacobson began his career in data communications developing control systems for the Department of Energy in the 1970s. He is best known for redesigning the TCP/IP protocol's flow-control algorithms to better handle congestion, preventing the Internet's collapse from traffic congestion in 1988-89. He is also widely recognized for his work on network synchronization effects, scalable multimedia protocols and applications, IP operations tools (e.g., traceroute and pathchar) and high-performance TCP implementations.

Prior to joining Packet Design as a member of the founding team, Jacobson was chief scientist at Cisco Systems, and before that had been group leader for Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory's Network Research Group.

The SIGCOMM Award has been presented every year since 1989. Prior recipients include Paul Baran, Vinton G. Cerf, David Farber and Leonard Kleinrock. ACM SIGCOMM is the world's largest professional society devoted to data communications.

Craig Partridge, chair of ACM SIGCOMM, said, "I'm delighted that our award panel selected Van as this year's recipient of the SIGCOMM Award. I have had the opportunity to work closely with Van over the past 14 years and see his creativity and commitment to data networking first-hand. He exemplifies the type of person the SIGCOMM Award is intended to recognize."

Packet Design, founded in May 2000, is the fourth networking company started by husband-and-wife entrepreneurs Judy Estrin and Bill Carrico. The pair founded Bridge Communications in 1981, Network Computing Devices in 1988 and Precept Software in 1995. When Precept was acquired by Cisco Systems in 1998, Estrin was named Cisco's chief technology officer, and Carrico senior vice president of Cisco's small and medium line of business. Estrin, who sits on the boards of directors of The Walt Disney Company, The Federal Express Corporation and Sun Microsystems, has been named three times to Fortune Magazine's list of the 50 most powerful women in American business. Packet Design has raised $24 million in private funding from Foundation Capital and individual investors, including former Netscape CEO James Barksdale and Sun Microsystems Chief Scientist Bill Joy. For more information, visit Packet Design's web site at http://www.packetdesign.com.

Founded in 1947, ACM (http://www.acm.org) is the world's first education and scientific computing society. With more than 80,000 members worldwide, a dynamic series of authoritative publications, a wide range of special interest groups (SIGs) and an outstanding array of conferences, workshops and forums, ACM is a world-class resource for the entire technology field. The ACM Digital Library is one of the most prestigious and comprehensive online repositories of technical information about computer science, featuring citations, abstracts, reviews, and full-text articles from ACM journals, magazines, conference proceedings, newsletters, as well as third-party content.