Vinton Cerf

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What Does Vinton Cerf Mean?

Vinton "Vint" Cerf is a famous American computer scientist and one of the fathers of the Internet, along with another famous American computer scientist Robert E. Kahn. His contributions to the computer field and Internet have been highly recognized and praised, and Cerf is the recipient of multiple awards and honorary degrees, including the Turing Award, the National Medal of Technology, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and a membership in the National Academy of Engineering.

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Cerf and Kahn co-developed the TCP/IP protocol suite, which later became the foundation for the modern Internet.

Techopedia Explains Vinton Cerf

In the early years of his career, Cerf worked at the United States Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), where he played a key role in guiding the creation of the Internet, Internet-based security and data packet technologies.

From 1982 to 1986, he served as the vice president of MCI Digital Information Services, where he headed the design of MCI Mail, the first professional email service connected to the Web. In 1994, he rejoined MCI to serve as the senior vice president of technology strategy. In this position, he helped to steer business strategy development from a technical outlook.

In 1992, together with Rober Kahn, he co-founded the Internet Society, which offers leadership in Internet-based education, standards and policies. In 1999, he became a board member for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

Since 2005, he has worked for Google as the vice president and the chief Internet evangelist. His duties in this role involve the identification of new empowering technologies to assist in the creation of sophisticated, Internet-related products and services.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert

Margaret is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.