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"I realized it had taken 20
years for the Internet to take off, from 1973 until 1993, so I
wondered what I should be doing to prepare for our needs in
the future."
As senior vice-president of
Internet architecture and technology at MCI World COM, Cerf is
the company's chief Internet strategist and works to advance
Internet frameworks. In the 1980's, he led the engineering
team that launched MCI E-mail, the first commercial Internet
e-mail service.
Cerf recently joined a small
team of engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab to develop a
wireless communications network that would move the Internet
into outer space. This project, named the Interplanetary Net
(IPN), is developing a system in which space probes and
satellites will act as Net gateways and allow space craft and
astronauts to talk to and from Earth and among themselves.
In 1992, Cerf founded the
Internet Society and served as its president for three years
and chairman of the board until 1999. He also serves as
technical adviser to the television show Gene Roddenberry's
Earth: Final Conflict. Cerf received his BA in math from
Stanford in 1965 and his MS and Ph. D. degrees from UCLA.
He is a recipient of the US
National Medal of Technology and is a member of President
Clinton's panel on Information Infrastructure which focuses on
the next generation Internet.
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