Vinton Cerf last week joined an eclectic group that includes such luminaries as Nelson Mandela, Andy Griffith, Hank Aaron, David Packard and Gordon Moore when he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The medal is the highest honor given to a civilian in the United States.
Cerf co-wrote the TCP/IP protocol with Robert Kahn, who also received the Medal of Freedom this year.
Cerf, who now works at Google as a vice president and chief Internet evangelist, was working at Stanford University in 1974 when he and Kahn wrote their paper, “A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication,” which laid out the basics of TCP.
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