In September, Simon Lam, a former UT professor and computer scientist, was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame, an honorary award dedicated to internet pioneers.

A former professor of emeritus and regent’s chair emeritus in computer science #1, Lam was recognized for his contributions to internet application safety, including his development of secure network programming and the invention of secure sockets.

In 1969, Lam attended graduate school at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, where he met and worked for Leonard Kleinrock, one of the key architects of ARPANET — a military communication network that served as the predecessor to the modern internet.

Lam joined UT in 1977 as an assistant professor after working for three years at IBM Research. In 1990, Lam started to theorize the idea of a new “sublayer” at the bottom of the application layer of the internet we interact with. The sublayer would provide authentication between a client and server, as well as a universal security protocol that would surround data passing through “sockets” with encryption for protection.

Lam said he would have gone back to IBM if he did not get a tenured position at UT. If not for the intervention of James Browne, the chair of the Department of Computer Science at the time, he wouldn’t have gotten the position, and his work wouldn’t have been completed at the University. 

“(He told) the dean that, ‘We have trouble recruiting him, we cannot send him back to IBM,’” Lam said. “Then (the dean) overruled the committee … I got that promotion after one year.”

Lam said he doesn’t keep up with computer science much these days, focusing instead on looking after the health of himself and his wife. After all his decades of hard work, he said he is happy about his work being acknowledged by the Internet Hall of Fame.

“I am very glad that at my age, somewhat late, I was acknowledged,”  Lam said. “I’m very happy I finally found the energy and decided to go for this award.”