Martin Frost, talk, gold medal for first computer network news service

Martin Frost for creating the first network news service. Martin Frost, with input from John McCarthy and Les Earnest, created two successive news services that each was the first of its kind. Beginning in 1972, APE could be used either to connect to the Associated Press newswire or to search recent stories based on combinations of pre-selected keywords. Beginning in 1974 NS (for News Service) indexed and stored stories from both the Associated Press and New York Times news wires and allowed users to either search for recent stories using any combination or words or leave a standing request to be notified whenever a story appears that contains the specified words. NS was widely used by people on ARPAnet for general news information.
During the Three Mile Island nuclear incident in 1979 the emergency response team at Lawrence Livermore Lab found that they needed up-to-the-minute information on developments at the site but couldn't get it until they were provided with access to NS. During the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, Chinese students in the U.S. wanted to pass information to friends in China but there were no Internet connections there then. NS was then set up to locate news about China and forward it to a student distribution list so that they could print the stories and fax them home. Commercial news services were developed later that now provide similar functionality to anyone who wants it and is willing to pay a subscription fee.