List of Internet pioneers

John von Neumann

John von Neumann (1903–1957) was a founding figure of computing. Donald Knuth cites von Neumann as the inventor, in 1945, of the merge sort algorithm, in which the first and second halves of an array are each sorted recursively and then merged. Von Neumann wrote the sorting program for the EDVAC in ink, which was 23 pages long. He also worked on the philosophy of artificial intelligence with Alan Turing when the latter visited Princeton in the 1930s, and is said to have “pioneered the modern computer".

Hedy Lamarr

Hedy Lamarr (born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler) (1914–2000) was an Austrian and American film actress and inventor. At the beginning of World War II, Lamarr and composer George Antheil developed a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes, which used spread spectrum and frequency hopping technology to defeat the threat of jamming by the Axis powers. Though the US Navy did not adopt the technology until the 1960s, the principles of their work are now incorporated into modern Wi-Fi, CDMA, and Bluetooth technology, and this work led to their being inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.

Claude Shannon

Claude Shannon (1916–2001) called the "father of modern information theory", published "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" in 1948. His paper gave a formal way of studying communication channels. It established fundamental limits on the efficiency of communication over noisy channels, and presented the challenge of finding families of codes to achieve capacity.

Vannevar Bush

Vannevar Bush (1890–1974) helped to establish a partnership between U.S. military, university research, and independent think tanks. He was appointed Chairman of the National Defense Research Committee in 1940 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, appointed Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development in 1941, and from 1946 to 1947, he served as chairman of the Joint Research and Development Board. Out of this would come DARPA, which in turn would lead to the ARPANET Project. His July 1945 Atlantic Monthly article "As We May Think" proposed Memex, a theoretical proto-hypertext computer system in which an individual compresses and stores all of their books, records, and communications, which is then mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility.

Paul Baran

Paul Baran (1926–2011) developed the field of redundant distributed networks while conducting research at RAND Corporation starting in 1959 when Baran began investigating the development of survivable communication networks. This led to a series of papers titled "On Distributed communications" that in 1964 described a detailed architecture for a distributed survivable packet switched communications network. In 2012, Baran was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame by the Internet Society.

Donald Davies

Donald Davies (1924–2000) coined the term "packet switching" at the National Physical Laboratory in the United Kingdom. Previously working independently, the "packet" terminology was adopted when the ARPANET was designed in 1967, and became the key concept of the Internet Protocol. In 2012, Davies was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame by the Internet Society.

J. C. R. Licklider

Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider (1915–1990) was a faculty member of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and researcher at Bolt, Beranek and Newman. He developed the idea of a universal network at the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) of the United States Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). He headed IPTO from 1962 to 1963, and again from 1974 to 1975. His 1960 paper "Man-Computer Symbiosis" envisions that mutually-interdependent, "living together", tightly-coupled human brains and computing machines would prove to complement each other's strengths.

Charles M. Herzfeld

Charles M. Herzfeld (born 1925) is an American scientist and scientific manager, best known for his time as Director of DARPA, during which, among other things, he personally took the decision to authorize the creation of the ARPANET, the predecessor of the Internet.

In 2012, Herzfeld was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame by the Internet Society.

Bob Taylor

Robert W. Taylor (born 1932) was director of ARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office from 1965 through 1969, where he convinced ARPA to fund a computer network. From 1970 to 1983, he managed the Computer Science Laboratory of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where technologies such as Ethernet and the Xerox Alto were developed. He was the founder and manager of Digital Equipment Corporation's Systems Research Center until 1996. The 1968 paper, "The Computer as a Communication Device", that he wrote together with J.C.R. Licklider starts out: "In a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face." And while their vision would take more than "a few years", the paper lays out the future of what the Internet would eventually become.

Douglas Engelbart

Douglas Engelbart (1925-2013) was an early researcher at the Stanford Research Institute. His Augmentation Research Center laboratory became the second node on the ARPANET in October 1969, and SRI became the early Network Information Center, which evolved into the domain name registry.

Engelbart was a committed, vocal proponent of the development and use of computers and computer networks to help cope with the world’s increasingly urgent and complex problems. He is best known for his work on the challenges of human–computer interaction, resulting in the invention of the computer mouse, and the development of hypertext, networked computers, and precursors to graphical user interfaces.

Larry Roberts

Lawrence G. "Larry" Roberts (born 1937) is an American computer scientist. After earning his PhD in electrical engineering from MIT in 1963, Roberts continued to work at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory where in 1965 he connected Lincoln Lab's TX-2 computer to the SDC Q-32 computer in Santa Monica using packet-switching. In 1966, he became the chief scientist in the ARPA Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), where he led the development of the ARPANET. In 1973, he left ARPA to commercialize the nascent technology in the form of Telenet, the first data network utility, and served as its CEO from 1973 to 1980. In 2012, Roberts was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame by the Internet Society.

Leonard Kleinrock

Leonard Kleinrock (born 1934) published his first paper on digital network communications, "Information Flow in Large Communication Nets", in 1961. After completing his Ph.D. thesis in 1962, which provided a fundamental theory of digital message switching, he moved to UCLA. In 1969, a team at UCLA connected a computer to an Interface Message Processor, becoming the first node on ARPANET. In 2012, Kleinrock was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame by the Internet Society.

Louis Pouzin

Louis Pouzin (born 1931) is a French computer scientist. He invented the datagram and designed an early packet communications network, CYCLADES. His work was broadly used by Robert Kahn, Vinton Cerf, and others in the development of TCP/IP. In 1997, Pouzin received the ACM SIGCOMM Award for "pioneering work on connectionless packet communication". Louis Pouzin was named a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor by the French government on March 19, 2003. In 2012, Pouzin was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame by the Internet Society.

John Klensin

John Klensin's involvement with Internet began in 1969, when he worked on the File Transfer Protocol. Klensin was involved in the early procedural and definitional work for DNS administration and top-level domain definitions and was part of the committee that worked out the transition of DNS-related responsibilities between USC-ISI and what became ICANN.

His career includes 30 years as a Principal Research Scientist at MIT, a stint as INFOODS Project Coordinator for the United Nations University, Distinguished Engineering Fellow at MCI WorldCom, and Internet Architecture Vice President at AT&T; he is now an independent consultant. In 1992 Randy Bush and John Klensin created the Network Startup Resource Center, helping dozens of countries to establish connections with FidoNet, UseNet, and when possible the Internet.

In 2003, he received an International Committee for Information Technology Standards Merit Award. In 2007, he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery for contributions to networking standards and Internet applications. In 2012, Klensin was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame by the Internet Society.

Bob Kahn

Robert E. "Bob" Kahn (born 1938) is an American engineer and computer scientist, who in 1974, along with Vint Cerf, invented the TCP/IP protocols. After earning a Ph.D. degree from Princeton University in 1964, he worked for AT&T Bell Laboratories, as an assistant professor at MIT, and at Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN), where he helped develop the ARPANET IMP. In 1972, he began work at the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) within ARPA. In 1986 he left ARPA to found the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI), a nonprofit organization providing leadership and funding for research and development of the National Information Infrastructure

Vint Cerf

Vinton G. "Vint" Cerf (born 1943) is an American computer scientist. He is recognized as one of "the fathers of the Internet", sharing this title with Bob Kahn.

He earned his Ph.D. from UCLA in 1972. At UCLA he worked in Professor Leonard Kleinrock's networking group that connected the first two nodes of the ARPANET and contributed to the ARPANET host-to-host protocol. Cerf was an assistant professor at Stanford University from 1972–1976, where he conducted research on packet network interconnection protocols and co-designed the DoD TCP/IP protocol suite with Bob Kahn. He was a program manager for the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) from 1976 to 1982. Cerf was instrumental in the formation of both the Internet Society and Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), serving as founding president of the Internet Society from 1992–1995 and in 1999 as Chairman of the Board and as ICANN Chairman from 2000 to 2007. His many awards include the National Medal of Technology, the Turing Award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and membership in the National Academy of Engineering and the Internet Society's Internet Hall of Fame.

Steve Crocker

Steve Crocker (born 1944 in Pasadena, California) has worked in the ARPANET and Internet communities since their inception. As a UCLA graduate student in the 1960s, he helped create the ARPANET protocols which were the foundation for today's Internet. He created the Request for Comments series, authoring the very first RFC and many more. He was instrumental in creating the ARPA "Network Working Group", the forerunner of the modern Internet Engineering Task Force.

Crocker has been a program manager at the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), a senior researcher at USC's Information Sciences Institute, founder and director of the Computer Science Laboratory at The Aerospace Corporation and a vice president at Trusted Information Systems. In 1994, Crocker was one of the founders and chief technology officer of CyberCash, Inc. He has also been an IETF security area director, a member of the Internet Architecture Board, chair of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) Security and Stability Advisory Committee, a board member of the Internet Society and numerous other Internet-related volunteer positions. Crocker is chair of the board of ICANN.

For this work, Crocker was awarded the 2002 IEEE Internet Award "for leadership in creation of key elements in open evolution of Internet protocols". In 2012, Crocker was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame by the Internet Society.

Jon Postel

Jon Postel (1943–1998) was a researcher at the Information Sciences Institute. He was editor of all early Internet standards specifications, such as the Request for Comments (RFC) series. His beard and sandals made him "the most recognizable archetype of an Internet pioneer".

The Internet Society's Postel Award is named in his honor, as is the Postel Center at Information Sciences Institute. His obituary was written by Vint Cerf and published as RFC 2468 in remembrance of Postel and his work. In 2012, Postel was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame by the Internet Society.

Elizabeth Feinler

Elizabeth J. "Jake" Feinler (born 1931) was a staff member of Doug Engelbart's Augmentation Research Center at SRI and PI for the Network Information Center (NIC) for the ARPANET and the Defense Data Network (DDN) from 1972 until 1989. In 2012, Feinler was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame by the Internet Society.

Peter Kirstein

Peter T. Kirstein (born 1933) is a British computer scientist and a leader in the international development of the Internet. In 1973, he established one of the first two international nodes of the ARPANET. In 1978 he co-authored "Issues in packet-network interconnection" with Vint Cerf, one of the early technical papers on the internet concept. Starting in 1983 he chaired the International Collaboration Board, which involved six NATO countries, served on the Networking Panel of the NATO Science Committee (serving as chair in 2001), and on Advisory Committees for the Australian Research Council, the Canadian Department of Communications, the German GMD, and the Indian Education and Research Network (ERNET) Project. He leads the Silk Project, which provides satellite-based Internet access to the Newly Independent States in the Southern Caucasus and Central Asia. In 2012, Kirstein was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame by the Internet Society.

Danny Cohen

Danny Cohen led several projects on real-time interactive applications over the ARPANet and the Internet starting in 1973. After serving on the computer science faculty at Harvard University (1969–1973) and Caltech (1976), he joined the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) at University of Southern California (USC). At ISI (1973–1993) he started many network related projects including, one to allow interactive, real-time speech over the ARPANet, packet-voice, packet-video, and Internet Concepts. In 1981 he adapted his visual flight simulator to run over the ARPANet, the first application of packet switching networks to real-time applications. In 1993, he worked on Distributed Interactive Simulation through several projects funded by United States Department of Defense. He is probably best known for his 1980 paper "On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace" which adopted the terminology of endianness for computing.

Cohen was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2006 for contributions to the advanced design, graphics, and real-time network protocols of computer systems and as an IEEE Fellow in 2010 for contributions to protocols for packet switching in real-time applications. In 1993 he received a United States Air Force Meritorious Civilian Service Award. And in 2012, Cohen was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame by the Internet Society.

Paul Mockapetris

Paul V. Mockapetris (born 1948), while working with Jon Postel at the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) in 1983, proposed the Domain Name System (DNS) architecture. He was IETF chair from 1994 to 1996.

Mockapetris received the 1997 John C. Dvorak Telecommunications Excellence Award "Personal Achievement - Network Engineering" for DNS design and implementation, the 2003 IEEE Internet Award for his contributions to DNS, and the Distinguished Alumnus award from the University of California, Irvine. In May 2005, he received the ACM Sigcomm lifetime award. In 2012, Mockapetris was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame by the Internet Society.

Joyce Reynolds

Joyce K. Reynolds of USC's Information Sciences Institute (ISI) served as RFC Editor, together with Bob Braden, from 1987 to 2006, and also performed the IANA function with Jon Postel until this was transferred to ICANN, and worked with ICANN in this role until 2001. She was IETF User Services Area Director and a member of the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) from 1990 to 1998. She has authored or co-authored many RFCs. In 2006, together with Bob Braden, she received the Internet Society's Postel Award in recognition of her services to the Internet.

David Clark

David D. Clark (born 1944) is an American computer scientist. During the period of tremendous growth and expansion of the Internet from 1981 to 1989, he acted as chief protocol architect in the development of the Internet, and chaired the Internet Activities Board, which later became the Internet Architecture Board. He is currently a Senior Research Scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

In 1990 Clark was awarded the ACM SIGCOMM Award "in recognition of his major contributions to Internet protocol and architecture." In 1998 he received the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal "for leadership and major contributions to the architecture of the Internet as a universal information medium". In 2001 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery for "his preeminent role in the development of computer communication and the Internet, including architecture, protocols, security, and telecommunications policy". In 2001, he was awarded the Telluride Tech Festival Award of Technology in Telluride, Colorado, and in 2011 the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford "in recognition of his intellectual and institutional contributions to the advance of the Internet."

Dave Mills

David L. Mills (born 1938) is an American computer engineer. Mills earned his PhD in Computer and Communication Sciences from the University of Michigan in 1971. While at Michigan he worked on the ARPA sponsored Conversational Use of Computers (CONCOMP) project and developed DEC PDP-8 based hardware and software to allow terminals to be connected over phone lines to an IBM System/360 mainframe computer.

Mills was the chairman of the Gateway Algorithms and Data Structures Task Force (GADS) and the first chairman of the Internet Architecture Task Force. He invented the Network Time Protocol (1981), the DEC LSI-11 based fuzzball router that was used for the 56 kbit/s NSFNET (1985), the Exterior Gateway Protocol (1984), and inspired the author of ping (1983). He is an emeritus professor at the University of Delaware.

In 1999 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, and in 2002, as a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE). In 2008, Mills was elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). In 2013 he received the IEEE Internet Award "For significant leadership and sustained contributions in the research, development, standardization, and deployment of quality time synchronization capabilities for the Internet."

Radia Perlman

Radia Joy Perlman (born 1951) is the software designer and network engineer who developed the spanning-tree protocol which is fundamental to the operation of network bridges. She also played an important role in the development of link-state routing protocols such as IS-IS (which had a significant influence on OSPF). In 2010 she received the ACM SIGCOMM Award "for her fundamental contributions to the Internet routing and bridging protocols that we all use and take for granted every day."

Dennis M. Jennings

Dennis M. Jennings is an Irish physicist, academic, Internet pioneer, and venture capitalist. In 1984, the National Science Foundation (NSF) began construction of several regional supercomputing centers to provide very high-speed computing resources for the US research community. In 1985 NSF hired Jennings to lead the establishment of the National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET) to link five of the super-computing centers to enable sharing of resources and information. Jennings made three critical decisions that shaped the subsequent development of NSFNET:

Jennings was also actively involved in the start-up of research networks in Europe (European Academic Research Network, EARN - President; EBONE - Board member) and Ireland (HEAnet - initial proposal and later Board member). He chaired the Board and General Assembly of the Council of European National Top Level Domain Registries (CENTR) from 1999 to early 2001 and was actively involved in the start-up of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). He was a member of the ICANN Board from 2007 to 2010, serving as Vice-Chair in 2009-2010. In April 2014 Jennings was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame.

Steve Wolff

Stephen "Steve" Wolff participated in the development of ARPANET while working for the U.S. Army. In 1986 he became Division Director for Networking and Communications Research and Infrastructure at the National Science Foundation (NSF) where he managed the development of NSFNET. He also conceived the Gigabit Testbed, a joint NSF-DARPA project to prove the feasibility of IP networking at gigabit speeds. His work at NSF transformed the fledgling internet from a narrowly focused U.S. government project into the modern Internet with scholarly and commercial interest for the entire world. In 1994 he left NSF to join Cisco as a technical manager in Corporate Consulting Engineering. In 2011 he became the CTO at Internet2.

In 2002 the Internet Society recognized Wolff with its Postel Award. When presenting the award, Internet Society (ISOC) President and CEO Lynn St.Amour said “…Steve helped transform the Internet from an activity that served the specific goals of the research community to a worldwide enterprise which has energized scholarship and commerce throughout the world.” The Internet Society also recognized Wolff in 1994 for his courage and leadership in advancing the Internet.

Van Jacobson

Van Jacobson is an American computer scientist, best known for his work on TCP/IP network performance and scaling. His work redesigning TCP/IP's flow control algorithms (Jacobson's algorithm) to better handle congestion is said to have saved the Internet from collapsing in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He is also known for the TCP/IP Header Compression protocol described in RFC 1144: Compressing TCP/IP Headers for Low-Speed Serial Links, popularly known as Van Jacobson TCP/IP Header Compression. He is co-author of several widely used network diagnostic tools, including traceroute, tcpdump, and pathchar. He was a leader in the development of the multicast backbone (MBone) and the multimedia tools vic, vat, and wb.

For his work, Jacobson received the 2001 ACM SIGCOMM Award for Lifetime Achievement, the 2003 IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award, and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2006. In 2012, Jacobson was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame by the Internet Society.

Ted Nelson

Theodor Holm "Ted" Nelson (born 1937) is an American sociologist and philosopher. In 1960 he founded Project Xanadu with the goal of creating a computer network with a simple user interface. Project Xanadu was to be a worldwide electronic publishing system using hypertext linking that would have created a universal library. In 1963 he coined the terms "hypertext" and "hypermedia". In 1974 he wrote and published two books in one, Computer Lib/Dream Machines, that has been hailed as "the most important book in the history of new media." Sadly, his grand ideas from the 1960s and 1970s never became completed projects.

Tim Berners-Lee

Timothy John "Tim" Berners-Lee (born 1955) is a British physicist and computer scientist. In 1980, while working at CERN, he proposed a project using hypertext to facilitate sharing and updating information among researchers. While there, he built a prototype system named ENQUIRE. Back at CERN in 1989 he conceived of and, in 1990, together with Robert Cailliau, created the first client and server implementations for what became the World Wide Web. Berners-Lee is the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a standards organization which oversees and encourages the Web's continued development, co-Director of the Web Science Trust, and founder of the World Wide Web Foundation.

In 1994, Berners-Lee became one of only six members of the World Wide Web Hall of Fame. In 2004, Berners-Lee was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his pioneering work. In April 2009, he was elected a foreign associate of the United States National Academy of Sciences, based in Washington, D.C. In 2012, Berners-Lee was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame by the Internet Society.

Mark P. McCahill

Mark P. McCahill (born 1956) is an American programmer and systems architect. While working at the University of Minnesota he led the development of the Gopher protocol (1991), the effective predecessor of the World Wide Web, and contributed to the development and popularization of a number of other Internet technologies from the 1980s.

Robert Cailliau

Robert Cailliau (French: [kaˈjo], born 1947), is a Belgian informatics engineer and computer scientist who, working with Tim Berners-Lee and Nicola Pellow at CERN, developed the World Wide Web. In 2012 he was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame by the Internet Society.

Marc Andreessen

Marc L. Andreessen (born 1971) is an American software engineer, entrepreneur, and investor. Working with Eric Bina while at NCSA, he co-authored Mosaic, the first widely used web browser. He is also co-founder of Netscape Communications Corporation.

Eric Bina

Eric J. Bina (born 1964) is an American computer programmer. In 1993, together with Marc Andreessen, he authored the first version of Mosaic while working at NCSA at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Mosaic is famed as the first killer application that popularized the Internet. He is also a co-founder of Netscape Communications Corporation.

Birth of the Internet plaque

A plaque commemorating the "Birth of the Internet" was dedicated at a conference on the history and future of the internet on July 28, 2005 and is displayed at the Gates Computer Science Building, Stanford University. The text printed and embossed in black into the brushed bronze surface of the plaque reads: