Stephen Crocker

Biography

In the formative days of the ARPANET, Dr. Stephen D. Crocker developed the key technologies, processes and organizations that continue to support the Internet today. At the University of California, Los Angeles, the first node on the ARPANET, he organized the Network Working Group across the network’s many sites. He also led the suite of protocols that ran in ARPANET host computers, including the first host-host protocol, the Network Control Protocol. NCP was used in the first 12 years of the Internet’s history and was the basis of subsequent host protocols, most notably, the Transmission Control Protocol. In 1969, Dr. Crocker initiated the “Requests for Comments” series of documents that continues to be the primary publication for Internet standards. More recently, he served as the Internet Engineering TaskForce’s first security director.

He holds several patents, especially in relation to CyberCash, a pioneering Internet payment system, which he helped found.