Israel’s NREN Founders Inducted into Israel Internet Association Hall of Fame

Just forty years ago, most of the world had not yet heard the words “computer network” or “internet.” But Israel had already joined the annals of digital history. Upon receiving the country-code top-level domain .IL, Israel became the third country in the world to claim an address in the online space – right behind the United States and the United Kingdom. It was the Inter-University Computation Center (IUCC), home to Israel’s NREN, that made all that happen.

When Prof. Danny Dolev, IUCC’s first Chairman, returned from post-doctoral work at Stanford and IBM’s research labs, he knew that the network he was exposed to in the U.S. would usher in a new future – at least for academia. Together with Prof. Shmuel Peleg, a senior researcher at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the father of email in Israel, he formed a group that coordinated and integrated how each university would construct its own piece and how the connections would be coordinated. Israel was the first country outside the United States to build an infrastructure like this. Soon after, Hank Nussbacher, IUCC’s current Network Manager and the man behind connecting 19 colleges and universities in the U.S. in the first communications network that would be the precursor to the global internet, was charged with doing the same for Israel’s academic community.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

In recognition of the roles they played, Dolev, Nussbacher and Peleg, together with seven others, are being inducted into the Israel Internet Association (ISOC-IL) Hall of Fame in Jerusalem to mark the 40th anniversary of the Internet in Israel.

Israel’s premier business daily, Globes, published a front-page feature on the ten honored visionaries: who saw the potential, seized the opportunity, fought to embed powerful networks into academia and industry, and laid the infrastructure for what would soon transform Israel into the Start-Up Nation.