Vinton Cerf photo courtesy wcom.com (WorldCom USA)

Inventors of the Internet Protocol

In May, 1974, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) published a paper titled "A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection." The paper's authors -- Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn -- described a protocol called "TCP" that incorporated both connection-oriented and datagram services.

Robert Kahn photo courtesy CNRI

... . It soon became apparent to the two men that this design should be subdivided into two separate protocols. Session management was not easy to do in an application-independent way. In practice, an application could sometimes run more efficiently or be implemented more easily when it managed network connections itself. "TCP" became Internet Protocol (IP) that supported datagrams and Transmission Control Protocol (TCP/IP) that added connection semantics as a layer on top of IP.