Internet creators Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf took a fledgling experiment and grew it into an alternative to mass media. Vinton G. Cerf is dapper, convivial, pragmatic and from California. Robert E. Kahn is reserved, deep in piles of information and of concepts and is from New York City. They are unique in their common ability to sacrifice personal gain for project completion, and they emerged in 1970 from hundreds of enthusiastic contributors to be the prime movers in the development of the Internet.

Bob Kahn enrolled in a five-year engineering program, which included both Queens College and City College in Manhattan. He worked summers at Bell Laboratories at a time when color TV and digital communications were developing, but he chose telephone traffic engineering which was math intensive. In this work he gained a macroscopic view of the telephone system operations and for large-scale system design and simulation. He graduated from City College in 1960, and attended Princeton University in New Jersey on a National Science Foundation fellowship and chose as his Ph.D. thesis in electrical engineering two math problems, one using band width more efficiently and the other representing signals by sampling. The results were published in two different IEEE journals. After two years as an assistant professor at MIT teaching information theory, he joined the BBN Corp in Cambridge and became involved in computer networking development, and worked on the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency {ARPA}. Objectives were to develop "packet switching" network, and to decentralize so that no one military target would shut down the communications.

Circuit-switched telephone lines were not economical for bursts of data or "packets". Packets-switched networks break up messages into packets, stamp them with the message's address, and intersperse them with packets of other messages. On arriving at their destination, the packets are regrouped into the original messages. Kahn, with input from Severo Ornstein, authored BBN Technical Report # 1763 which included method of controlling errors, sequencing messages and managing the buffer space that held incoming, unassembled messages. In December 1968, BBN was chosen to build the world's first packet-switched network, and Kahn was persuaded to mastermind the setup, with the first node {software, some hardware, and interfaces} designed built, and installed at the University of California just nine months later on September 1st, 1969.

Vinton G. Cerf was the son of personnel executive of Rockwell International Corp. They were testing rocket engines and he became hooked on science. At Stanford University, he took both math and computer science courses, and opted for the later. At IBM Corp. in Los Angeles, he found satisfaction as a programmer. As a graduate student at UCLA, which he attended to advance his schooling, Vin worked on the ARPA project and, significantly, UCLA was to be the first node of the ARPAnet with other participants being SRI International, Menlo Park, Calif., UC at Santa Barbara, and University of Utah, Salt Lake City. The sites were to be linked by BBN's subnet of customized minicomputers called Interface Messages Processors {Imps} connected by dedicated high-speed phone lines.