Steve Crocker
Stephen D. Crocker is the inventor of the Request for Comments series, authoring the very first RFC and many more. He attended Van Nuys High School, as did Vint Cerf and Jon Postel. Crocker received his bachelor's degree and PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles. Crocker was appointed as chair of the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, ICANN in 2011.
Steve Crocker has worked in the Internet community since its inception. As a UCLA graduate student in the 1960s, he was part of the team that developed the protocols for the ARPANET which were the foundation for today's Internet. For this work, Crocker was awarded the 2002 IEEE Internet Award.
While at UCLA Crocker taught an extension course on computer programming. The class was intended to teach digital processing and assembly language programming to high school teachers, so that they could offer such courses in their high schools. A number of high school students were also admitted to the course, to ensure that they would be able to understand this new discipline. Crocker was also active in the newly formed UCLA Computer Club.
Crocker has been a program manager at Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a senior researcher at USC's Information Sciences Institute, founder and director of the Computer Science Laboratory at The Aerospace Corporation and a vice president at Trusted Information Systems. In 1994, Crocker was one of the founders and chief technology officer of CyberCash, Inc. In 1998, he founded and ran Executive DSL, a DSL-based ISP. In 1999 he cofounded and was CEO of Longitude Systems. He is currently CEO of Shinkuro, a research and development company.
Steve Crocker was instrumental in creating the ARPA "Network Working Group", which later was the context in which the IETF was created.
He has also been an IETF security area director, a member of the Internet Architecture Board, chair of the ICANN Security and Stability Advisory Committee, board member and chairman of ICANN, a board member of the Internet Society and numerous other Internet-related volunteer positions.
In 2012, Crocker was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame by the Internet Society.
