Transcript Vinton Cerf - Henry Samueli School of Engineering

Vinton Cerf
Co-Creator of the Internet
By Jeffery Park
•
•
•
Cerf was born in Los Angeles in 1943.
From 1961 to 1965, Cerf attended
Stanford and graduated with a B.S. in
mathematics.
After graduation, he started work at IBM
as a system engineer, but decided to go
back to school at UCLA to learn more
about his true passion: computers.
“There was something amazingly enticing about programming...
You created your own universe and you were master of it.”
At UCLA, Cerf joined a team of
students that helped build the first
node of the ARPANET (UCLA,
Stanford, University of Utah,
UCSB). The group called
themselves the Network Working
Group (NWG).
One of the NWG’s main tasks was creating a standard for
communication, or protocol, so that incompatible host computers on
ARPA’s network could communicate with each other.
Creating Protocols
The NWG created several small protocols
which could later be joined to see network
communication as a whole.
 The group created the Network Control
Protocol (NCP) in 1970, and other
protocols that were designed to work on
NCP (ex. Telnet).

The Birth of the Internet
•
•
•
Bolt Beranek & Newman (BBN) sent the
first IMP (Interface Message Processor) to
UCLA in August 1969.
From that point on, the ARPANET began
to grow quicker than most had imagined.
During this time period, Cerft met Bob
Kahn, who is also credited with the
creation of the internet.
Bob Kahn’s Question


Kahn asked Cerf a question that changed the
world: “Look, my problem is how I get a
computer that’s on a satellite and a computer on
a radio net and a computer on ARPANET to
communicate uniformly with each other without
realizing what’s going on in between?”
At this point, the two joined together to create
the most important protocol yet: the TCP
(Transmission-Control Protocol)
Creating a Gateway

Cerf and Kahn’s idea was to have a
gateway computer between each network
to route packets. This computer’s only task
would be to pass packets back and forth.
Since different networks transmitted with
different protocols, a new method had to
be developed.
A New Protocol



The two started their work in 1973, and completed their
idea in 1974. In May, they introduced their idea to the
International Networking Group.
The idea of the TCP is similar to how the post office
system works: Information is packed into “datagrams”,
which acts like envelopes. The datagram is then sent to
a gateway computer, which reads only the delivery
information to send the datagram to host computers. The
host computer would then be able to open the letter and
read what is kept inside the datagram.
TCP allowed many small networks to join with other
networks, which started the Internet as we know it today.
The Internet
Though TCP was the beginning of a new way of communication,
Cerf continued to update TCP and look for new and more
effective methods of communication between computers and
networks.
In 1976, Cerf started working as program
manager of the “ARPA Internet” at
ARPA. While there, he and his team
made yet another update that split TCP
into two parts: IP and TCP. IP would be
responsible for routing packages, and
TCP would do everything else.
TCP/IP, The Internet Today
The Internet that we all use today uses TCP/IP. Without the
protocol that was created by Cerf, the highly connected Internet
would not exist. The net would simply be a bunch of networks
that would not be able to properly communicate with each
other.
Today, Cerf is the chief
Internet strategist for MCI
WorldCom. He has done
work for NASA, and
believes the future of
communication is in
satellite communication.
Cerf strongly believes that the future of the Internet is in
interplanetary communication. Satellites would be used as
gateways to transfer information.
“The time is now to think beyond the Earth.”