Stephen Crocker

According to the Internet Hall of Fame’s online blog, Steve Crocker was there when the internet was born. The date was Oct. 29, 1969, and the place was the University of California, Los Angeles. Crocker was among a small group of UCLA researchers who sent the first message between the first two nodes of the ARPAnet, the U.S. Department of Defense–funded network that eventually morphed into the modern internet.

Crocker’s biggest contribution to the project was the creation of the Request for Comments, or RFC. Shared among the various research institutions building the ARPAnet, these were documents that sought to describe how this massive network would work, and they were essential to its evolution — so essential, they’re still used today.

Like the RFCs, Crocker is still a vital part of the modern internet. He’s the chairman of the board of ICANN, the organization which operates the internet’s domain naming system, following in the footsteps of his old high school and UCLA buddy Vint Cerf. And like Cerf, Crocker is part of the inaugural class inducted into the Internet Society‘s (ISOC) Hall of Fame.