British professor a pioneer of internet
PETER KIRSTEIN 1933-2020
British computer scientist Peter Kirstein, who has died aged 86, put the first European computer on what became the internet and remained involved with its evolution; he also gave Queen Elizabeth her first email address.
In 1972 American scientists working with the Arpanet ( Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) — developed in the late 1960s to control against nuclear threats and ensure survivability of the network in the face of significant disruption — were planning to establish a link from Norway by landline to the U. K. and on to the U.S. by satellite.
Kirstein, a professor at London University, felt that if the line was coming to Britain anyway, why not route it through Britain’s largest computer, based at University College London? On July 25, 1973 the UCL node of the Arpanet passed its first data between London and California.
For more than a decade Kirstein ran the U. K.’s connection to Arpanet out of UCL. Other research facilities gradually connected, establishing a small network, and in 1976 Kirstein gave the Queen her own email address, HME2.
Kirstein was responsible for the first implementation in Europe of the TCP/IP protocols, which enable different computer networks to share information.
Throughout the 1980s Kirstein was responsible for both the “. uk” and “. int” ( reserved for international treaty- based organizations) domains. It was he who insisted on “. uk” as the suffix for British internet addresses on the grounds that the alternative suggested by civil servants — “.gb” — would not include Northern Ireland.
In the 1990s Kirstein served on a UN committee set up to create a network in India, and headed a NATO project to bring the internet to central Asia and the southern Caucasus.
He was born Peter Thomas Kirschstein on June 20, 1933 in Berlin. The family moved to London, changing their name to Kirstein.
He studied mathematics at Cambridge and did his PHD in electrical engineering at Stanford.
He spent four years as an accelerator physicist at Cern in Geneva, and then worked for GE’S Corporate Research Centre in Zurich.
In 1967 he moved to University of London Institute of Computer Science and in 1973 to UCL as Professor of Computer Communications Systems.
In 1958 he married Gwen Oldham, who survives him with two daughters.