Openness
Ideas offered for comment rather than handed down as decrees. Anyone could join the conversation, and the best idea won.
~/biography
A mathematician who helped wire the world
Stephen D. Crocker has spent his career where computing, communication and community meet, and has helped keep the Internet open, stable and secure.
Early years
Los Angeles, 1960s
Born on October 15, 1944, Steve Crocker grew up in Los Angeles and attended Van Nuys High School, the same school as two future Internet pioneers, Vint Cerf and Jon Postel.
Cerf was a close high-school friend. Years later the two were colleagues at UCLA, and together with Postel they formed the core of the group that wrote the ARPANET's first protocols.
UCLA and the birth of a network
Crocker earned his B.A. in mathematics from UCLA in 1968. He stayed on as a graduate student just as UCLA became the first node of the ARPANET, the U.S. Department of Defense research network that grew into the Internet.
In 1969 he helped form the Network Working Group and wrote the very first Request for Comments, RFC 1, “Host Software.” He led the team of graduate students that designed the Network Control Program, the host-to-host protocol that standardized how computers joined the ARPANET.
In 1972 he formed the International Network Working Group. His research then turned toward artificial intelligence, and he completed his Ph.D. in computer science at UCLA in 1977.
A career on every side of the network
His career has run through government, academia and industry. He managed research at DARPA, was a senior researcher at USC's Information Sciences Institute, and founded the Computer Science Laboratory at The Aerospace Corporation. He then turned to industry: Vice President at Trusted Information Systems, co-founder and CTO of CyberCash, founder of Executive DSL, co-founder and CEO of Longitude Systems, and CEO of the research and development company Shinkuro.
Alongside that work he has given decades of volunteer service to the Internet's institutions: Security Area Director of the IETF, member of the Internet Architecture Board, trustee of the Internet Society, chair of ICANN's Security and Stability Advisory Committee and, from 2011 to 2017, Chair of the ICANN Board.
“We didn’t even appoint a leader.” Steve Crocker, on the early Network Working Group · IEEE Spectrum, 2020
Beyond the résumé
Crocker has described his life as a series of setbacks he worked his way through. His personal motto is about making a difference while looking after his physical and mental health. Family matters deeply to him, especially time with his wife.
Principles
The ideas behind the work
The values in the earliest RFCs still run through everything Crocker has built.
Collaboration
Rough consensus among peers. The Network Working Group's spirit carried directly into the IETF and its standards process.
Stability & security
A network the world depends on must be trustworthy. That conviction runs from the IETF's security area to ICANN's stability work.
Next
Go back to April 1969
How a graduate student's memo became the foundation of Internet standards.