Vint Cerf
Born on June 23rd, 1943, in New Haven, Connecticut, Vinton Cerf would one day be known as the "Father of the Internet", and for good reason. He attended Van Nuys High School, near Los Angeles, California, where he stood out among the other students. He and his best friend, Steve Crocker (who would later work closely with Cerf during the development of the first networks) were academic whizzes, both highly skilled in math. While they were still in high school, Crocker was given permission to use the UCLA computer, and Cerf was quick to join him.

After graduating from high school, Cerf went on to get a degree in math at Stanford, using a scholarship granted him from North American Aviation (which is now Rockwell Int'l), where his father was a senior executive. There he became further immersed in computers and all that could be done with them. During his time at Stanford, he took several different summer jobs with North American Aviation. After graduating, he became a systems engineer for IBM at the Los Angeles Data Center. He found that he needed more knowledge in the field of computer science, however, and so he became a research assistant for Jerry Estrin in 1967. There he worked with Estrin on the "Snuper Computer", a project involving using one computer to observe the execution of programs on another computer. He was joined by Crocker in 1968, and when the ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) contracted project was given to Len Kleinrock Cerf and Crocker were leaders among some 40 other students that Kleinrock managed in the new Network Measurement Center. Their goal was to devise ways to analyze and test the performance of networks - a challenging task considering the fact that there was no network at UCLA at this time. Meanwhile, Cerf had met and married his wife, Sigrid.

In the fall of 1969 Kleinrock's team received their first IMP, or interface messaging processor, an intermediate computer that would control the network being developed by ARPA. Bob Khan had already paved the way for networks by developing packet switching technology, and the UCLA team was given instructions for building a hardware interface between their Sigma-7 computer and the IMP, as well as the device driver. After much work, on October 1st, 1969, the first true network was established between UCLA's Sigma-7 and one of ARPA's SRI computers, via two IMPs.

Now that an actual network existed, Bob Khan and others were finally able to test all of the different possibilities that before had only been postulation. During this time of analyzing the network, Vint began to work closely with Khan, a relationship that would later be crucial in the development of networking protocols. In 1972 Cerf returned to Stanford, this time as an assistant professor of Computer Science. He was also at the head of an International Network Working Group. In 1973, he began working again with Bob Khan - this time to develop the means of building a network of networks. They first developed the idea of having gateways, or routing computers, to act, in essence, as liaisons between each network. The next problem, and perhaps the more daunting, was the need for a standard protocol between networks. In a paper published in 1974, Cerf and Khan presented their ideas for encapsulating and decapsulating packets of information in the form of transmission-control protocol messages. The current technology left all of the responsibility for the integrity of the data on the shoulders of the IMPs, which had to check and retransmit the data at each point in the transmission, depending heavily upon the reliability of the underlying network. TCP, however, worked under the assumption that the underlying network was not reliable at all. Therefore, the responsibility for the integrity of the packets was now upon only the receiving hosts. If they did not send back an acknowledgement that all of the data was received in good shape, the sending host would again transmit the data. By having a gateway between each network that would route only the necessary packets to its network and translate the protocol from the sending computer to one that its own network could use, the need for complex interfaces between each network could be negated, as well.

In 1976 Cerf became a program manager for ARPA. In 1977 Cerf, Khan, and several others set up the first three-network system. They successfully transmitted data packets from San Francisco Bay to London via a packet-radio net that transmitted to ARPANET, which in turn transmitted via a satellite link to London, where it was sent back across the ARPANET again, to its final destination at the University of California's Information Sciences Institute.

Then, in 1978, Cerf, along with Jon Postel (who had also worked under Kleinrock in 1968 and 1969) and Danny Cohen, put forth the idea for a second protocol to work in concert with TCP. This new internet protocol, or IP, would handle the routing of all of the individual datagram packets by the gateways. The benefit of splitting the TCP into two different protocols was that the gateways would now only need to be able to route the packages where they needed to go. This allowed for an increase in the speed of the gateways, and an decrease in their cost. Although Jon Postel was primarily responsible for this further enhancement of TCP, it can be seen that it was an important development.

Today, Cerf is the Senior Vice President of Internet Architecture and Engineering for MCI.