MOUNTAIN VIEW, July 14 — Vint Cerf turned 83 last month, and he is still one of the most important people you have never met. In 1974, Cerf and Bob Kahn co-designed the TCP/IP protocol, the fundamental plumbing that lets the internet work. Think of it like the postal service for data — it figures out how to break a message into packets, send them across a maze of different networks, and then reassemble them perfectly at the destination.
Before that, computers could not talk to each other reliably. After it, everything changed.
The moment the internet went live
The practical upshot of their work hit on January 1, 1983. That was the day TCP/IP became the official standard for the ARPANET, the military-funded network that Kahn had helped build using packet-switching concepts. In plain terms, that single date marks the birth of the internet as we know it.
Every email, every video call, every website you visit today runs on the rules Cerf and Kahn wrote down nearly 50 years ago. It is hard to overstate that legacy.
Cerf has spent the last two decades at Google, serving as its Chief Internet Evangelist since 2005. His job is not to sell ads or build products — it is to think about where the internet is headed and to advocate for its continued growth and openness. Here is what it means: while most tech executives worry about quarterly earnings, Cerf worries about whether the next billion people will get online and what protocols they will use when they do.
A rare double honor
Kahn, for his part, co-founded the Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI) in 1986, a nonprofit that continues to work on advanced networking and information infrastructure. He is less visible than Cerf in the public eye, but his fingerprints are all over the internet’s architecture. The two men have been recognized at the highest levels.
In 2004, they shared the Turing Award, often called the Nobel Prize of computing. The very next year, in 2005, President George W.
Bush awarded them both the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. That back-to-back recognition — first from the computing world, then from the nation — underscores just how foundational their work is. So here is the question as of July 2026: what is next for the internet’s fathers?
Cerf continues to speak publicly about issues like internet governance, digital preservation, and interplanetary networking — yes, he is working on a protocol for communicating with spacecraft. Kahn remains active at CNRI, pushing research forward.
The protocols they designed in 1974 are now so deeply embedded in modern life that we barely notice them. That, in the end, might be the greatest compliment. The best infrastructure is invisible.
