In 1965 Cerf He received his BA in mathematics from Stanford University in California. He then worked for IBM as a systems engineer before attending the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he obtained a master’s degree and then a doctorate in computer science in 1970 and 1972, respectively. He then returned to Stanford, where he joined the college of computer science and electrical engineering.
While I was at UCLA, Cerf worked with fellow student Stephen Crocker in Leonard Kleinrock’s lab on the project to write the communication protocol (Network Control Program [or Protocol]; NCP) for ARPANET (Network of Advanced Research Project Agencies; see DARPA) the first computer network based on packet switching, until now an unproven technology. (Unlike ordinary telephone communications, in which a specific circuit must be dedicated to transmission, packet switching divides a message into “packets” that travel independently on many different circuits). UCLA was among the original four ARPANET nodes. Cerf also worked on the software that measured and tested the performance of the ARPANET. While working on the protocol, Cerf met Kahn, an electrical engineer who was then the lead scientist at Bolt Beranek & Newman. The professional relationship of Cerf with Kahn was one of the most important of his career.
In 1972, Kahn moved to DARPA as a program manager in the Office of Information Processing Techniques (IPTO), where he began envisioning a network of packet-switched networks, essentially what would become the Internet. In 1973 Kahn approached Cerf, already a professor at Stanford, to help him design this new network. Cerf and Kahn produced a preliminary version of what they called the ARPA Internet, the details of which were published as a joint document in 1974. Cerf joined Kahn at IPTO in 1976 to manage the office’s networking projects. Together, with many fellow DARPA-sponsored contributors, they produced TCP / IP (Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol), an electronic transmission protocol that separated packet error checking (TCP) from domain and destination-related issues ( IP).
The work of Cerf to make the Internet a publicly accessible medium he continued after he left DARPA in 1982 to become vice president of MCI Communications Corporation (WorldCom, Inc., 1998-2003). While at MCI he led efforts to develop and implement MCI Mail, the first commercial email service that was connected to the Internet.
In 1986 Cerf he became vice president of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, a nonprofit corporation located in Reston, Virginia, that Kahn, as president, had formed to develop web-based information technologies for the public good. Cerf he also served as founding president of the Internet Society from 1992 to 1995. In 1994, he returned to MCI as Senior Vice President, and from 2000 to 2007 he served as president of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the group which monitors the growth and expansion of the Internet. In 2005 he left MCI to become Vice President and “leading internet evangelist“at the search engine company Google Inc.
Among the many honors received by Cerf include the Charles Stark Draper Award from the US National Academy of Engineering (2001), the Prince of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research (2002), the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2005), the Queen Elizabeth Award of Engineering (2013) and the French Legion of Honor (2014).