7 Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf 7Charles Stark Draper Prize for his role in developing the
Internet.
Vint Cerf
In 1965 Vinton Gray Cerf received his bachelor’s degree in
mathematics from Stanford University, Calif., U.S. He then
worked for IBM as a systems engineer before attending
the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), where
he earned a master’s degree in computer science in 1970.
He returned to Stanford and completed his doctorate in
computer science in 1972.
While at UCLA, Cerf wrote the communication
protocol for the ARPANET, the first computer network
based on packet switching, a heretofore untested technol-
ogy. (In contrast to ordinary telephone communications,
in which a specific circuit must be dedicated to the trans-
mission, packet switching splits a message into “packets”
that travel independently over many different circuits.)
UCLA was among the four original ARPANET nodes.
While working on the protocol, Cerf met Kahn, an elec-
trical engineer who was then a senior scientist at Bolt
Beranek & Newman. Cerf ’s professional relationship with
Kahn was among the most important of his career.
In 1972 Kahn moved to DARPA as a program manager
in the IPTO, where he began to envision a network of
packet-switching networks—essentially, what would
become the Internet. In 1973 Kahn approached Cerf, then
a professor at Stanford, to assist him in designing this new
network. Cerf and Kahn soon worked out a preliminary
version of what they called the ARPA Internet, the details
of which they published as a joint paper in 1974. Cerf
joined Kahn at IPTO in 1976 to manage the office’s net-
working projects. Together they produced TCP/IP, an
electronic transmission protocol that separated packet