Vint Cerf helped build the internet and now works on one for planets
Vint Cerf, co-designer of the TCP/IP rules that let computer networks talk to one another, is often called a father of the internet. Less known: as a high schooler he wrote test software for Apollo rocket engines, he met his wife at a hearing aid office, and he is now helping NASA design networking between planets.
Born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1943, Cerf went to Van Nuys High School alongside two future networking pioneers, Steve Crocker and Jon Postel. During those school years he spent six months at Rocketdyne, helping write statistical software for non-destructive testing of the F-1 engines used in the Apollo program. After a mathematics degree from Stanford he spent two years at IBM, then went to UCLA for graduate study, finishing his doctorate in 1972.
At UCLA he worked in Leonard Kleinrock's packet networking group, which linked the first two machines on the ARPANET, and there he met Bob Kahn. With Yogen Dalal and Carl Sunshine he wrote the first specification of the Transmission Control Program, published in December 1974, and with Kahn he co-designed the TCP/IP suite during a stint teaching at Stanford. From 1973 to 1982 he funded networking research at DARPA, including radio and satellite packet networks built for military needs.
Later he led the engineering of MCI Mail, which in 1989 became the first commercial email service connected to the internet. In 1992 he and Kahn helped found the Internet Society, with Cerf as its first president, and he chaired ICANN, the body that coordinates domain names, from 2000 to 2007. He then spent years at Google with the job title Chief Internet Evangelist, and he is known for turning up in a three-piece suit in a famously casual industry.
Cerf and his wife Sigrid are both hard of hearing, which shaped his advocacy for accessibility and his seat on the board of Gallaudet University. With the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, he is working on an interplanetary internet built to cope with long delays and interruptions caused by moving planets. His honours include the Turing Award and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Source: Vint Cerf
