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.[2] 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 (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 lead to a series of papers titled "On Distributed communications"[4] that in 1964 described a detailed architecture for a distributed survivable packet switched communications network.
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).[2][6] 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.
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.[8] He was the founder and manager of Digital Equipment Corporation's Systems Research Center until 1996.[9] 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."[10] 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 (born 1925) 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.
Lawrence G. "Larry" Roberts (born 1937) is an American computer scientist.[11] 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.[12] 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.
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 packet 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.
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.[16][17] 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.
Vinton G. "Vint" Cerf (born 1943) is an American computer scientist.[19] 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.
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 Comment (RFC) series. His beard and sandals made him "the most recognizable archetype of an Internet pioneer".
Peter T. Kirstein (born 1933) is a British computer scientist and a leader in the international development of the Internet.[24] In 1973, he established one of the first two international nodes of the ARPANET.[25] In 1978 he co-authored "Issues in packet-network interconnection" with Vint Cerf, one of the early technical papers on the internet concept.[26] 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 the Silk Project, which provides satellite-based Internet access to the Newly Independent States in the Southern Caucasus and Central Asia.
Paul V. Mockapetris, while working with Jon Postel at the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) in 1983, proposed the Domain Name System (DNS) architecture.[27][28] He was IETF chair from 1994 to 1996.
Stephen "Steve" Wolff participated in the development of ARPANET while working for the U.S. Army.[48] 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.[49] He also conceived the Gigabit Testbed, a joint NSF-DARPA project to prove the feasibility of IP networking at gigabit speeds.[50] 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.[51] In 1994 he left NSF to join Cisco as a technical manager in Corporate Consulting Engineering.[48] In 2011 he became the CTO at Internet2.
Timothy John "Tim" Berners-Lee (born 1955) is a British physicist and computer scientist.[63] In 1980, while working at CERN, he proposed a project using hypertext to facilitate sharing and updating information among researchers.[64] While there, he built a prototype system named ENQUIRE.[65] 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
