Vinton Cerf, One of the "Fathers of the Internet," Responds to Student Query

Autograph Note Signed, ca. 2020, n.p. 1 p., 8.25 x 11 in. In response to a question from a student, Vinton Cerf wrote and signed this response about "the most pivotal moment" in the creation of the Internet. Complete TranscriptWhat was the most pivotal moment during the creation of the internet?There were many, but here are 4:1. First paper published in IEEE Transactions on Communications, May 19742. First complete TCP spec: RFC 675, Dec 19743. First 3-network demonstration Nov 22, 19774. Launch of operational Internet 1 January 19835. (ok, I cheated) The initiation of commercial services in 1989. Vint CerfHistorical BackgroundAs one of "the fathers of the Internet" for his development with Bob Kahn (b. 1938) of the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), "Vint" Cerf was uniquely positioned to answer this question. In 2005, President George W. Bush presented Cerf and Kahn with the Presidential Medal of Freedom for their work in developing the software that made the interconnection of computers on the Internet possible.Although the student asked for the "most pivotal" moment in the creation of the Internet, Cerf offered four, then, admitting "ok, I cheated," added a fifth.The first item referred to the seminal article Cerf co-authored with Bob Kahn entitled "A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication," published in the May 1974 issue of IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) Transactions on Communications, Vol. Com-22, No. 5.Cerf's second item came seven months later and was the result of his collaboration with his graduate students Carl Sunshine and Yogen K. Dalal, when they published in December 1974, the Request for Comments 675 called "Specification of Internet Transmission Control Program."The third item was the demonstration on November 22, 1977, of the transfer of data among three different networks in the United States, England, and Norway. A packet radio laboratory in a GMC van parked in Menlo Park, California, transferred data to the University of Southern California in Los Angeles via Norway and London, England, across three types of networks: packet radio, satellite, and ARPANET. This successful internetworking was a major milestone in the development of the Internet, a "network of networks."Cerf's fourth item is the recognized birthday of the Internet on January 1, 1983, when American communication networks, especially ARPANET and the Defense Data Network, moved to the TCP/IP standard. Additional networks were required to convert to the TCP/IP standard if they wanted to connect to any defense networks. The National Science Foundation connected its supercomputer centers to the Internet in 1985.Cerf's fifth "pivotal event" was the debut in the United States of The World, the first commercially available dial-up internet service provider (ISP), in 1989. For years, the National Science Foundation had banned commercial ISPs, permitting only government agencies and universities to use the Internet. Initially, many government and university systems blocked The World's Internet connection. By 1991, the National Science Foundation relented and lifted the ban, and CompuServe, The Source, and America Online (AOL) soon became broadly popular ISPs using existing telephone transmission lines.In December 1969, the U.S. Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) connected four computer network nodes at UCLA, Stanford, U.C. Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah for the first time. In a fortieth anniversary retrospective in 2009, an interviewer from Scientific American asked Cerf to identify "the single most important event" in the development of the Internet. Cerf responded, "Choosing a single most important development is incredibly hard to do because a lot of different things had to happen before the Internet could be deployed in the fashion it is today. ARPANET validated packet switching, which was important, because without. (See website for full description).…