… had seized upon this idea, then called the Hyperball International Network creating a virtual world wide web of ultrafast digital communication.
The discovery earned him the Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineers’ Gordon Bell Prize in 1989, considered the Nobel Prize of computing, and he was later hailed as one of the fathers of the Internet. Since then, he has won more than 100 prizes for his work and Apple computer has used his microprocessor technology in their Power Mac G4 model. Today he lives in Washington with his wife and son.
“The Internet as we know it today did not cross my mind,” Emeagwali told TIME. “I was hypothesizing a planetary-sized supercomputer and, broadly speaking, my focus was on how the present creates the future and how our image of the future inspires the present.”