Apr 28, 2022
With the convergence of the Metaverse, Web 3.0 and the blockchain, it’s hard to imagine just how far we have come over the last century. We can’t fully appreciate this giant leap forward, without examining the origins of the internet. Who better to help us understand this journey and how we got where we are today than Dr. Vinton Cerf. Dr. Cerf, widely considered “One of the Fathers of the Internet,” helped to develop the TCP/IP protocol.
Since 2005, Dr. Cerf has served as Google’s vice president and chief Internet evangelist. He identifies new technologies to support the development of advanced, Internet-based products and services.
Dr. Cerf is the former Senior Vice President of Technology Strategy for MCI. There, he guided MCI’s technical strategy.
In December 1997, President Clinton presented the U.S. National Medal of Technology to Cerf and his colleague, Robert E. Kahn, for founding and developing the Internet.
In 2004, Drs. Kahn and Cerf won the Alan M. Turing Award for their work on the Internet protocols. The Turing award is sometimes called the “Nobel Prize of Computer Science.”
In November 2005, President George Bush awarded Cerf and Kahn the Presidential Medal of Freedom for their work. The medal is the highest civilian award given by the United States to its citizens. In April 2008, Cerf and Kahn received the prestigious Japan Prize.
Prior to rejoining MCI in 1994, Cerf was vice president of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI). As vice president of MCI Digital Information Services from 1982 to 1986, he led the engineering of MCI Mail, the first commercial email service, to be connected to the Internet. During his tenure from 1976 to 1982 with the U.S. Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Cerf played a key role leading the development of Internet and Internet-related packet data and security technologies.