VINT CERF - FATHER OF THE INTERNET

“The net will stop being a part of the telephone network. Instead the telephone network will become a part of the net.”- Cerf

Vinton Gray Cerf (born June 23, 1943 in New Haven, Connecticut). As a graduate student at UCLA, he was involved in the early design of the ARPANET. He was present when the first IMP was delivered to UCLA. He is called the father of the internet. He earned this nickname as one of the co-authors of TCP/IP-the protocol that allowed ARPA to connect various independent networks together to form one large network of networks-the internet. He headed a group in 1973 with Bob Kahn that invented the TCP/IP protocol. He joined the board of the internet corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers or ICANN in 1999 and is currently serving a term until 2007. In 2001, he was awarded the Strowger Award from Ohio University’s J.W. McClure School of communication systems management. In October 2002,he was awarded (together with Bob Kahn, Larry Roberts and Tim Berners-Lee) Premio Principle de Asturias de Investigacion Cientifica, the most distinguished Spanish award. In early 2005 it was announced that Cerf, along with Robert Kahn were named the ACM’s 2004 Turing Award winners for their work on the design of internet protocols.