Vinton Gray Cerf was co-designer of the mechanisms known as TCP/IP that enabled the Internet's capability to be used by
everybody.
Cerf dreamt of becoming a scientist as a ten year-old boy in California, after being inspired by the book 'The Boy Scientist'. He studied computer science and worked as a programmer in the sixties and seventies with ARPA - the organisation that was already then laying the foundations of the Internet with the ARPANET.
Realising that the rules controlling how Internet traffic flowed were becoming fast outdated, Cerf dreamt up a new set of standards to replace it. He hooked up with Bob Kahn to develop the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and, a little later, the Internet Protocol (IP) as well.
The protocol freed up the amount of traffic the Internet could carry, and although it was intended strictly for serious pursuits, the new bandwidth opened the doors to all the content available today.
