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Paul Baran
Born
Distributed networks. At the RAND Corporation between 1960 and 1964 Baran worked out how a communications network could survive heavy damage: link many nodes in a mesh, cut each message into small blocks and let every block find its own route. The telephone monopoly dismissed the idea and it was not built at the time, but his reports were read by the ARPANET's designers and his analysis of redundancy still underpins network planning. He died in 2011.
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Donald Davies
Born
Packet switching. Working independently of Baran at Britain's National Physical Laboratory, Davies proposed in 1965 a national data network that would break messages into short blocks he called packets, the word the whole industry adopted. His team built the NPL network in Teddington, one of the first packet-switched networks in use, and his ideas fed directly into the ARPANET's design. He died in 2000.
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Leonard Kleinrock
Born
Network performance theory. Kleinrock's doctoral work at MIT applied queueing theory to networks of message switches, giving engineers a way to predict delays and capacity before building anything. At UCLA his laboratory hosted the first ARPANET node, and on 29 October 1969 his student Charley Kline sent the first message to Stanford, which crashed after two letters.
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Larry Roberts (computer scientist)
Born
The ARPANET plan. As programme manager at the US Defense Department's research agency from 1966, Roberts wrote the plan for the ARPANET, adopted packet switching after hearing of Davies's and Baran's work, and chose Bolt Beranek and Newman to build the small routing computers. He then ran the network's growth and later founded Telenet, an early commercial packet network. He died in 2018.
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Steve Crocker
Born
Requests for Comments. As a UCLA graduate student in 1969 Crocker led the informal Network Working Group that designed the ARPANET's first host protocols, and wrote RFC 1, deliberately titling its notes requests for comments so that anyone could propose and argue. That open, written, anyone-may-contribute process is how internet standards are still made, and the series has passed nine thousand documents.
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Jon Postel
Editor and number keeper. Postel edited the RFC series for nearly thirty years and personally kept the registry of addresses, port numbers and protocol codes that later became the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, so that every network used the same numbers. He wrote or edited the specifications for IP, TCP, SMTP email and more, and his robustness principle, be conservative in what you send and liberal in what you accept, guided implementers for decades. He died in 1998.
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Ray Tomlinson
Network email. Messages could already be left for users of the same computer. In 1971 Tomlinson, an engineer at Bolt Beranek and Newman, adapted a file-transfer program to deliver them between machines on the ARPANET, and chose the at sign to separate the user's name from the host's. Email quickly became the network's most used application, and his addressing convention is still universal. He died in 2016.
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Louis Pouzin
Datagrams. Pouzin led France's CYCLADES network from 1971, which made the network itself simple and unreliable and gave the computers at each end the job of checking and reassembling data. That datagram approach was far easier to scale than the ARPANET's managed links, and Cerf and Kahn built it into TCP/IP. CYCLADES lost its funding in the late 1970s, but the internet runs on its central idea.
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Elizabeth J. Feinler
The Network Information Center. From 1972 to 1989 Feinler ran the ARPANET's Network Information Center at the Stanford Research Institute, which kept the directory of every host and user and published the host table each computer downloaded to find the others. Her group also ran the naming registry when the domain system arrived and helped settle the original top-level domains such as .com, .edu and .gov.
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Robert Kahn (computer scientist)
Born
Open-architecture networking. Kahn had helped design the ARPANET's routing computers at Bolt Beranek and Newman before moving to the defence research agency in 1972, where he faced joining radio, satellite and wired networks that worked in completely different ways. His answer was a common protocol over networks that stayed independent, and in 1974 he and Vint Cerf published the design that became TCP/IP.
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Vint Cerf
Born
TCP/IP. Cerf co-designed the Transmission Control Protocol with Bob Kahn in 1974 and led its development at Stanford and then the defence research agency, later splitting it into TCP for reliability and IP for addressing and routing. He managed the move of the whole ARPANET to TCP/IP on 1 January 1983. He has since championed the internet's open standards, for many years as Google's chief internet evangelist.
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Peter T. Kirstein
Born
Taking the network abroad. In 1973 Kirstein's group at University College London became one of the first sites outside the United States connected to the ARPANET, overcoming British government reluctance and running the link for British researchers. UCL then took part in the first tests joining three different networks with TCP/IP in 1977, and his team helped build Britain's academic connections to the internet. He died in 2020.
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David D. Clark
Born
The end-to-end principle. With Jerome Saltzer and David Reed, the MIT researcher Clark argued in 1981 that functions such as reliability belong at the ends of a network rather than inside it, the design rule that kept the internet's core simple enough to grow. As the internet's chief protocol architect through the 1980s he steered its engineering, and his description of how standards are made, rough consensus and running code, became the working motto of the Internet Engineering Task Force.
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Paul Mockapetris
Born
The Domain Name System. By the early 1980s a single host file copied to every computer could no longer keep up with the network's growth. At the University of Southern California, working with Jon Postel, Mockapetris designed the Domain Name System in 1983, a distributed, hierarchical directory in which each organisation runs its own part. It still turns every web address into a numeric one, billions of times a day.
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David L. Mills
Born
Network Time Protocol. At the University of Delaware Mills wrote the Network Time Protocol, first published in 1985, which lets computers across the internet agree on the time to within milliseconds despite unpredictable delays. Logs, security certificates, financial systems and phone networks all depend on it. He also built the Fuzzball routers used on the early NSFNET backbone and maintained NTP for decades. He died in 2024.
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Radia Perlman
Spanning tree and robust routing. At Digital Equipment in 1985 Perlman invented the Spanning Tree Protocol, which lets the switches in a large Ethernet network find loop-free paths among themselves automatically, so networks could grow without careful hand wiring. She also made link-state routing resilient to faulty routers, work that shaped the IS-IS protocol many large providers still use, and later designed TRILL. She dislikes being called the mother of the internet.
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Van Jacobson
Congestion control. In October 1986 traffic between two Berkeley sites fell to a thousandth of normal speed as computers resent lost packets and made jams worse. At Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory Jacobson, working with Michael Karels, worked out the slow-start and congestion-avoidance rules, published in 1988, that make TCP back off when the network is crowded. Every internet connection still obeys versions of them. He also wrote traceroute and co-wrote tcpdump.
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Yakov Rekhter
Border Gateway Protocol. At a 1989 engineering meeting Rekhter, then at IBM, and Kirk Lougheed of Cisco sketched on napkins a protocol for independent networks to tell each other which addresses they could reach. BGP became the system by which tens of thousands of providers and companies exchange routes, the glue between the networks that make up the internet. Rekhter also co-designed MPLS and helped devise the classless addressing that slowed the exhaustion of IPv4 addresses.
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Tim Berners-Lee
Born
The World Wide Web. At CERN in 1989 Berners-Lee proposed a hypertext system for sharing physics documents, and by 1991, working with Robert Cailliau, he had written HTML, the HTTP protocol, URLs and the first browser and server. In 1993 CERN put the web's technology into the public domain without royalties, which is why it spread so fast. He founded the World Wide Web Consortium to keep its standards open.
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Sally Floyd
Born
Managing queues in routers. Floyd, a researcher at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, designed Random Early Detection with Van Jacobson in 1993, which has routers drop or mark a few packets before their queues overflow so connections slow down gradually instead of all at once. She also co-designed Explicit Congestion Notification and set out what counts as fair behaviour for new protocols sharing the network with TCP. She died in 2019.
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Steve Deering
IP multicast and IPv6. Deering's Stanford doctoral work devised IP multicast, a way to send one stream to many receivers without copying it to each. He was then lead designer of IPv6 with Bob Hinden, specified from 1995, whose vastly larger address space was the internet's answer to running out of IPv4 numbers. Adoption took decades, but a large share of today's traffic now travels over it.
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F. Thomson Leighton
Born
Content delivery. An MIT mathematician, Leighton worked with his student Danny Lewin on algorithms for spreading web traffic across many servers, and in 1998 they co-founded Akamai to put copies of popular content on servers close to users around the world. Content delivery networks of this kind now carry much of the web's video and software downloads and absorb traffic spikes that would swamp a single site. He is Akamai's chief executive.
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Daniel Lewin
Born
Consistent hashing. As an MIT graduate student Lewin helped develop consistent hashing, a way of assigning content to servers so that adding or losing a machine moves only a small share of it. That made it practical to run thousands of cache servers, and he co-founded Akamai with Tom Leighton in 1998 as its chief technology officer. The technique is now used throughout large distributed systems. He was killed on 11 September 2001 aboard American Airlines Flight 11.
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