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Vint Cerf, Tireless Mover and Shaker
Yes, the Internet has changed the world, but its arrival wasn't some "Where were you when" event. The Internet emerged gradually, and it continues to evolve, perhaps ultimately to serve as the cornerstone of all communication. So it should come as no surprise that Vint Cerf, one of the Internet's founding fathers and a leader in commercializing it, continues to this day to lay the groundwork for its future.
It wasn't until 1988, 16 years after the first public demonstrations of Internet technology and about five years after NASA, DARPA and other government agencies began to rely on it, that Cerf walked into Interop with then-3Com CEO Eric Benhamou and found himself incredulous at the mammoth vendor exhibits there. After calculating the show costs, he realized there had to be a better way for companies to market their products and brands. So he persuaded the Federal Networking Council to let him connect MCIMail (which he had helped engineer) to the National Science Foundation backbone. By 1989, there were three commercial Internet service providers--PSINet, a spin-off of NYSERNet; UUnet, a nonprofit; and Cerfnet, run by General Atomics.
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