Peter T. Kirstein

Peter Thomas Kirstein was born in Berlin, Germany in 1933, but moved to the UK in 1937. He was educated at Highgate School in London. He went to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, from where he received a degree in Mathematics and Electrical Engineering (1954), with further degrees in MSc Electrical Engineering (1955) and PhD (1958) from Stanford University and a DSc (1970) from University of London. His PhD thesis was entitled “A solution to the equations of space-charge flow by the method of the separation of variables”.

Following stints as a lecturer at Stanford, accelerator physicist at CERN in Geneva, evaluating European scientific research for General Electric's European office, he joined the University of London's Institute of Computer Science in 1967, first as Reader and then Professor of Computer Communications Systems. He transferred to the new UCL Department of Statistics and Computer Science in 1973, helping set up the Computer Science Department and becoming its first head of department (1980-1994). He continued as Director of Research in that department for some years, and remained an active Professor until his death in 2020, aged 86.

It was at UCL in the early 1970s that Professor Kirstein started the first UK ARPANET node, becoming the second node outside the US after NORSAR in Norway. In 1982 UCL adopted TCP/IP, a year before ARPANET in general did, and in 1985 he was responsible for registering the .uk top-level domain. His involvement in the early internet and his place as an interlocutor between US and European research organisations, defence agencies and industry was essential to the spread of internet technology and particularly in its adoption in Europe.

Peter Kirstein received many awards including:

Marconi Award (2015)
Internet Pioneer of the Internet Society (2012)
Honorary Foreign Fellow of the US National Academy of Engineering (2009)
Lifetime Achievement Award of the Royal Academy of Engineering (2006)
Honorary Fellow of UCL (2006)
CBE (2003)
Internet Society’s Postal Award (2003)
Honorary Foreign Fellow of the US Academy of Arts and Science (2002)
ACM SIGCOM Award (1999)
IEE Senior Award (1999)
Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (1985)

Peter was a Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society as well as a Fellow of the Institute of Engineering and Technology and the Institute of Physics, and a Senior Member of the Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineers.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/08/technology/peter-kirstein-dead.html