Vint Cerf



During his graduate student years, he studied under Professor Gerald Estrin, worked in Professor Leonard Kleinrock's data packet networking group that connected the first two nodes of the predecessor[10] to the Internet (the ARPANet [10]), and "contributed to a host-to-host protocol" for the ARPANet[11]. While at UCLA, he also met Robert E. Kahn, who was working on the ARPANet hardware architecture[11]. After receiving his doctorate, Cerf became an assistant professor at Stanford University from 1972-1976, where he "conducted research on packet network interconnection protocols and co-designed the DoD TCP/IP protocol suite with Kahn.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinton_Cerf

By the end of 1968, a small group of graduate students from the four schools that were slated to be the first four nodes on the ARPANET (UCLA, Stanford, the University of Utah, and UC Santa Barbara) began meeting regularly to discuss the new network and problems related to its development. They called themselves the Network Working Group (NWG). The NWG proved to be instrumental in solving many of the problems that would arrive during the design and implementation of the ARPANET, but they did not realize their importance at the time. Cerf recalls, "We were just rank amateurs, and we were expecting that some authority would finally come along and say, 'Here's how we are going to do it.' And nobody ever came along."

http://www.ibiblio.org/pioneers/cerf.html