Programmer
June 23, 1943
inducted in the class of 2004
Notable accomplishments:
- Served as founding chair of the International Network Working Group (1972)
- Co-developed (with Robert Kahn) the TCP/IP protocol that allowed for the development of the ARPANET (now Internet) (1974)
- Founding president of the Internet Society (1992)
Quotes:
“One of the earliest applications was remote access to other people’s computers to run programs and to transfer files back and forth. In 1971, networked electronic mail was invented by one of our colleagues Ray Tomlinson. He was the guy that selected the @ sign to separate the personal identifier from the host identifier. Those applications told us first that there was a lot of utility to connecting computers together. But the second thing that told us is that there was a social component to what we were doing. Very quickly after email was invented, people started building mailing lists so they could send email conveniently to multiple parties. The first list that I joined was called Sci-Fi Lovers because we all read science fiction and we argued who was the best author. Then the second mailing list I joined was called Yum Yum. That was a Stanford mailing list that evaluated restaurants in the Palo Alto area. Eventually, I think it expanded to include San Francisco and San Jose. Very early on the social components were quite dramatic. Powerful.” (Google Cloud interview, October 5, 2023)
“I didn’t pay enough attention to security. Before public-key cryptography came around, key distribution was a really messy manual process. It was awful, and it didn’t scale. So that’s why I didn’t try to push that into the Internet. And by the time they did implement the RSA algorithm, I was well on my way to freezing the protocol, so I didn’t push the crypto stuff. I still don’t regret that, because graduate students, who were largely the people building and using the Internet, would be the last cohort of people I would rely on to maintain key discipline, though there are times when I wish we had put more end-to-end security in the system to begin with.” (Interview in IEEE Spectrum, May 7, 2023)
Suggested reading:
“The Internet is for Everyone” by Vint Cerf (2014)
Learn more:
Inductee profile at the A.M. Turing Award