Vinton Gray Cerf

American computer scientist

• Born: June 23, 1943
• Place of Birth: New Haven, Connecticut

Cerf, with colleague Robert Kahn, created the protocols under which the Internet exchanges information from one computer network to another, leading to the development of the World Wide Web.

Early Life

Born prematurely, Vinton Gray Cerf (sehrf) developed very slowly as a toddler to the point that some thought he was developmentally disabled. His mother, however, recognized his long attention span and discounted the naysayers. It was discovered later that he had a form of hearing loss that would worsen as he aged. Vinton took lip-reading classes after school hours in elementary grades to supplement his hearing aid. Early on he developed a keen strategy for asking questions, which helped him control a conversation and know the basics of a discussion or speech, even if he could not ascertain specifics. His father, a former naval captain, took a job in California with North American Aviation. The young Vinton observed numerous tests of rocket engines, which stimulated his thinking.

Vinton was a mathematics wizard at Van Nuys High School in Southern California. At Van Nuys he developed a lifelong friendship with fellow student Stephen Crocker, who would later work with him on networking technology. It was Crocker who introduced him to computers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Crocker secured permission from UCLA officials for the two friends still in high school to use a Bendix G-15 computer at UCLA, where they were enrolled in calculus classes. Cerf, who was a meticulous dresser, could always be found either in his Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) uniform or in formal business attire, carrying his briefcase.

Life’s Work

Cerf entered Stanford University as a mathematics major. He came to realize that writing computer programs led to a mastery over devices. Upon graduation with a BS in mathematics in 1965, he got a job as a programmer for International Business Machines (IBM) in Los Angeles.

Two years later, Cerf, by this time recognizing a need for more formal studies in computer sciences, enrolled as a graduate student at UCLA. In 1967, UCLA had a large contract with the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the US Department of Defense, which offered Cerf plenty of work. UCLA professor Leonard Kleinrock had an ARPA contract to connect computers at four sites: Stanford; UCLA; the University of California, Santa Barbara; and the University of Utah. Kleinrock, along with Paul Baran and Donald W. Davies, had created the concept of packet switching as a means to transfer information electronically by breaking information for transmission into bits (or packets). Each packet would travel (and, hence, communicate) across a computer network via the fastest possible route (telephone lines) and would be reassembled at the receiving end (another network). Packet switching was much more rapid than the competing and more widely used circuit switching, in which a dedicated line moved the information en masse from one computer to another within a network.

Cerf worked on what came to be called the ARPANET node at UCLA, the first within the developing network, and was its chief programmer. Through this effort he got to know Robert Kahn, the chief designer of the ARPANET. Kahn was working for the consulting firm Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN) of Cambridge, Massachusetts, which had been contracted to build the machines necessary to run ARPANET’s message processing. By December of 1969, the pair had run all sorts of tests on the fledgling network to check for possible failures and to improve the network’s effectiveness and efficiency.

Completing his doctoral thesis in March 1972, Cerf helped coordinate the conference at UCLA that convinced circuit-switching proponents that packet switching was the wave of the future. At the conference he was designated chair of the International Network Working Group, and one month later he joined the faculty at Stanford as a professor of electrical engineering. Kahn, who had left BBN and joined ARPA full time, approached the young professor with a new problem. While a single network could communicate effectively using packet switching, the challenge was how information could travel from one computer network to another computer network. The pair agreed that such a network of networks needed to be open-ended, that is, the networks would have to function while using their own, established computing “rules.” The two sketched out the design of such a network on the back of an envelope in a San Francisco hotel in the spring of 1973. They envisioned a set of computers that would sit between networks and serve as routers of information traffic, and then reconfigure packets from a “foreign” network into a form that could be received and read by the “originating” network. The entire system would have to be governed by a set of standard protocols for the assembly, transmission, and reassembly of the information.

Their definitive paper on the subject appeared one year later (1974) in the journal of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, IEEE Transactions and Communications. In what would later be considered a true landmark document in the history of computing (no original drafts of the paper exist), they proposed a set of two protocols: a Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) that controls the manner in which information is broken into packets and reassembled, and an Internet Protocol (IP), which would govern how computers send these packets over a network. Cerf dedicated himself to the continuing refinement of these TCP/IP protocols at Stanford and then joined the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA, formerly ARPA), on a full-time basis in 1976.

The first demonstration of the use of TCP protocol between independent networks occurred in 1977 with the operation of a wide area network (WAN). The demonstration consisted of sending electronic information from a vehicle driving in the San Francisco Bay Area. The vehicle’s computer connected to a gateway at BBN in Massachusetts, which, in turn, sent the information via a satellite link to a computer in Norway. From Norway, the information reached a site in London, was sent back to BBN, and then reached the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute, making a 94,000-mile “trip” around the world. The information sent from the Bay Area was disassembled at its sending source by a router, transmitted in packets to Europe through various computers, and then reassembled without the loss of any packets of information at its final receiving site in Los Angeles. The experiment was designed to demonstrate ARPANET’s military capabilities, enabling information transmission without enemy interference; an enemy would have to take down an entire network of networks to stop information from reaching its intended recipient or recipients a virtually impossible task. Many who worked on this project realized the enormous social potentials of this technology.

During the following years, Cerf guided the continuing development of the Internet (the term Internet was collectively adopted for widespread use in 1983) from a variety of positions within the federal government, private industry, and nonprofit organizations. From 1982 to 1986, he served as the vice president of MCI Digital Information Services. He then joined the Corporation for National Research Initiatives as vice president. In 1992, Cerf cofounded with Kahn the Internet Society (ISOC), an organization with a goal to provide education and policy related to the Internet. Two years later, he rejoined MCI, this time as senior vice president of technology strategy.

In 2005, Cerf joined technology company Google, serving as a vice president and chief Internet evangelist. The following year, he spoke to the US Senate in support of net neutrality. Through the rest of the decade, the 2010s, and the 2020s, Cerf served on a variety of advisory boards, such as the Scientists and Engineers for America and the Governing Board of the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel; chaired a number of boards, including the non-profit anti-malware organization StopBadware and IETF's internationalized domain name working group; and was elected president of several groups, including the Association for Computing Machinery. In 2013, Cerf was appointed to the National Science Board by President Barack Obama. He served in that position until his term expired in 2018. In 2016, he worked with NASA to install delay-tolerant networking on the International Space Station.

Interestingly, part of Cerf's drive to improve the Internet came not only from his own hearing loss but also from the hearing loss of his wife Sigrid, who lost most of her hearing when she was three years old. Cerf also became a tireless advocate for the education and rights of the deaf and hearing impaired. The development of the Internet played a large part in these concerns. In reward for his efforts, Cerf, with Kahn, was awarded the Turing Award in 2004 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President George W. Bush in 2005. Other honors he has received include the inaugural Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering (2013), the Order of the Cross of Terra Mariana (2014), the Benjamin Franklin Medal (2018), and the IEEE Medal of Honor (2023).

Significance

Cerf’s development of TCP/IP protocols enables information from thousands of computer networks to communicate around the world. Coupled with the pioneering work of Tim Berners-Lee, who codeveloped the World Wide Web and its amazing addressing system (the Uniform Resource Locator, or URL), the Internet allows users, without additional programming from their own computers and software applications, to seamlessly move information and other media around the globe almost instantaneously.

Bibliography

Cerf, Vinton. "An Interview with Vint Cerf, One of the 'Fathers of the Internet.'" Interview by Alok Jha. The Economist, 5 July 2023, www.economist.com/vint-cerf-pod. Accessed 20 Aug. 2024.

Berners-Lee, Tim. Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web by Its Inventor. HarperSanFrancisco, 1999.

Cerf, Vinton G. Multiprocessors, Semaphores, and a Graph Model of Computation. University of California, Computer Science Department, 1972.

Ceruzzi, Paul E. A History of Modern Computing. 2nd ed., MIT Press, 2003.

Goodrich, Joanna. "IEEE Medal of Honor Goes to Vint Cerf." IEEE Spectrum, 31 Jan. 2023, spectrum.ieee.org/2023-ieee-medal-of-honor. Accessed 20 Aug. 2024.

"Vinton Gray Cerf." The Franklin Institute, 15 Mar. 2018, fi.edu/en/awards/laureates/vinton-gray-cerf. Accessed 11 June 2024.

"Vinton ("Vint") Gray Cerf." A.M. Turing Award, 2019, amturing.acm.org/award‗winners/cerf‗1083211.cfm. Accessed 20 Aug. 2024.

Yost, Jeffrey R. The Computer Industry. Greenwood Press, 2005.