Cerf, Vinton

Early Life and Career

Cerf was born, prematurely, in New Haven, Connecticut. Complications at his birth caused him to be about 60 percent deaf in both ears, leaving him reliant on hearing aids. His father was a senior executive at the aerospace firm North American Aviation, which later became Rockwell International. In a brief biography published on the WorldCom site (Cerf today is WorldCom's senior vice president of Internet architecture and technology), he writes that at age 10, he read a book called The Boy Scientist. That's all it took. “I knew I wanted to be one,” he wrote.

Cerf attended high school in Van Nuys, California, in auspicious company: Two of his schoolmates were Steve Crocker, later a key player in the development of the ARPANET, and Postel, himself a towering figure who would serve as executor of the World Wide Web addressing system until his death in 1998. During high school, Cerf discovered science fiction, a lifelong passion that reached a pinnacle in 1998, when he made a guest TV appearance as a presidential aide on the Star Trek spin-off Earth: Final Conflict.

Cerf finished high school and attended Stanford University to study mathematics, graduating in 1965. He took a job at IBM's Los Angeles Data Center, where he stayed for nearly two years. Realizing that he needed to know more about computing, he rejoined high-school buddy Crocker at UCLA's computer-science department, where he became a doctoral student at Len Kleinrock's ARPANET Network Measurement Center lab. This was the first node of the ARPANET, the U.S. Defense Department's nascent, nationwide computer network that was the forerunner of today's Internet, and Cerf's fingerprints were all over it. For instance, Cerf's name is very much in evidence on a key set of RFC (Request for Comment) documents that serve as the Internet's equivalent to The Federalist Papers, and that established the civil, sharing, open-source attitude that would characterize the network's entire development.

Just as importantly, Cerf was one of the UCLA students (Crocker and Postel also were among them) who developed ARPANET's Network Control Protocol (NCP), the computer-language convention that made communication possible on that primitive [Page 68]network. As a result, on October 29, 1969, Kleinrock's UCLA lab sent a message to a computer at the Stanford Research Institute in San Francisco, and the ARPANET was born.

Cerf began working closely with Bob Kahn in 1970. Their first project together was to conduct tests on the young ARPANET, causing it to fail in order to test its limits, and to dissuade overconfident researchers who thought the network was impervious to crashes. By 1973, two other networks had been created—one was radio-based, the other satellite based—and all were capable of shifting the same kind of uniquely addressed data packets that were used to move messages via computers on the ARPANET. But the networks could not communicate with each other. Kahn, a defense department computer scientist, had been the ARPANET's overall systems designer, and he wanted to find a way to rectify the situation—to create a small network of networks. Kahn chose Cerf (who by now was a Stanford University computer-science and electrical-engineering professor) for the job, because Cerf had been among the original NCP designers.

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