Stephen Wolff

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Stephen Wolff
Stephen Wolff - 2013.jpg
NationalityAmerican
Alma mater Princeton University
Swarthmore College
Scientific career
Institutions Johns Hopkins University

Stephen South Wolff is one of the many fathers of the Internet. [1] He is mainly credited with turning the Internet from a government project into something that proved to have scholarly and commercial interest for the rest of the world. Dr. Wolff realized before most the potential in the Internet and began selling the idea that the Internet could have a profound effect on both the commercial and academic world.

Contents

Education

Stephen Wolff earned a BSc with Highest Honors in Electrical Engineering from Swarthmore College in 1957, and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University in 1961. In 1962 he continued his studies with post-doctoral work at Imperial College. He taught electrical engineering at the Johns Hopkins University for ten years. [2] [1]

Contributions to the Internet

For fourteen years, Wolff worked as a communications and technology researcher for the United States Army. While working for the Army, Wolff introduced the UNIX operating system to Army labs in the early 1980s. [3] Also while working for the Army, Wolff managed a research group at the Aberdeen Proving Ground that participated in the development of ARPANET, a major technology precursor to the Internet, [3] and its linking to the US Army's network of supercomputers. [4]

In 1986, Wolff became Division Director for Networking and Communications Research and Infrastructure at the National Science Foundation and worked on commercializing the Internet by building a government-funded network that extended the ARPANET design into the civilian world, and spinning it off to the private sector. [4] He managed the NSFNET project which included a national backbone network in the U.S. that interconnected NSF sponsored supercomputing centers, regional research and education networks, federal agency networks, and international research and education networks. The five super computing centers were located at Princeton, Cornell, the University of California at San Diego, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the University of Pittsburgh/Carnegie-Mellon University. Wolff also managed grants to link the nation's universities together into regional networks that connected to the backbone and so provided universal connectivity to the academic community. The NSFNET was compatible with, interconnected to, and eventually replaced the ARPANET network. [5]

Wolff also conceived the Gigabit Testbed, a joint NSF-DARPA project designed to prove the feasibility of IP networking at gigabit speeds. [6]

In 1994, Wolff left NSF and joined Cisco where he helped with projects such as Internet2 and the Abilene Network. Wolff's career at Cisco began as business development manager for the Academic Research and Technology Initiative program. There, Wolff helped advance the University Research Project (URP) which supports academic research candidates with grants to further networking technology. [3] He was named the interim Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Internet2 on March 31, 2011. [7]

Major awards

In 2002 the Internet Society recognized Wolff with its Postel Award. When presenting the award, Internet Society (ISOC) President and CEO Lynn St. Amour said “…Steve helped transform the Internet from an activity that served the specific goals of the research community to a worldwide enterprise which has energized scholarship and commerce throughout the world.” [1]

The Internet Society also recognized Wolff in 1994 for his courage and leadership in advancing the Internet. [1]

In 2013, Dr. Wolff was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame. [8] [9]

Related Research Articles

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The history of the Internet has its origin in the efforts of scientists and engineers to build and interconnect computer networks. The Internet Protocol Suite, the set of rules used to communicate between networks and devices on the Internet, arose from research and development in the United States and involved international collaboration, particularly with researchers in the United Kingdom and France.

In telecommunications, packet switching is a method of grouping data into packets that are transmitted over a digital network. Packets are made of a header and a payload. Data in the header is used by networking hardware to direct the packet to its destination, where the payload is extracted and used by an operating system, application software, or higher layer protocols. Packet switching is the primary basis for data communications in computer networks worldwide.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Internet backbone</span> Vital infrastructure of the networks of the Internet

The Internet backbone may be defined by the principal data routes between large, strategically interconnected computer networks and core routers of the Internet. These data routes are hosted by commercial, government, academic and other high-capacity network centers, as well as the Internet exchange points and network access points, that exchange Internet traffic between the countries, continents, and across the oceans. Internet service providers, often Tier 1 networks, participate in Internet backbone traffic by privately negotiated interconnection agreements, primarily governed by the principle of settlement-free peering.

The National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET) was a program of coordinated, evolving projects sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) from 1985 to 1995 to promote advanced research and education networking in the United States. The program created several nationwide backbone computer networks in support of these initiatives. Initially created to link researchers to the NSF-funded supercomputing centers, through further public funding and private industry partnerships it developed into a major part of the Internet backbone.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ARPANET</span> Early packet switching network (1969–1990), one of the first to implement TCP/IP

The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first computer networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the technical foundation of the Internet. The ARPANET was established by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the United States Department of Defense.

The Computer Science Network (CSNET) was a computer network that began operation in 1981 in the United States. Its purpose was to extend networking benefits, for computer science departments at academic and research institutions that could not be directly connected to ARPANET, due to funding or authorization limitations. It played a significant role in spreading awareness of, and access to, national networking and was a major milestone on the path to development of the global Internet. CSNET was funded by the National Science Foundation for an initial three-year period from 1981 to 1984.

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The Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California is a nonprofit corporation formed in 1997 to provide high-performance, high-bandwidth networking services to California universities and research institutions. Through this corporation, representatives from all of California's K-20 public education combine their networking resources toward the operation, deployment, and maintenance of the California Research and Education Network, or CalREN. Today, CalREN operates over 8,000 miles of fiber optic cable and serves more than 20 million users.

The Commercial Internet eXchange (CIX) was an early interexchange point that allowed the free exchange of TCP/IP traffic, including commercial traffic, between ISPs. It was an important initial effort toward creating the commercial Internet that we know today.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Very high-speed Backbone Network Service</span>

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The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to the Internet.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Merit Network</span> Global LTE

Merit Network, Inc., is a nonprofit member-governed organization providing high-performance computer networking and related services to educational, government, health care, and nonprofit organizations, primarily in Michigan. Created in 1966, Merit operates the longest running regional computer network in the United States.

Federal Internet Exchange (FIX) points were policy-based network peering points where U.S. federal agency networks, such as the National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET), NASA Science Network (NSN), Energy Sciences Network (ESnet), and MILNET were interconnected.

Advanced Network and Services, Inc. (ANS) was a United States non-profit organization formed in September, 1990 by the NSFNET partners to run the network infrastructure for the soon to be upgraded NSFNET Backbone Service. ANS was incorporated in the State of New York and had offices in Armonk and Poughkeepsie, New York.

NEARnet was an innovative high-speed regional network for education, research and development, established in 1988 by a consortium led by Boston University, Harvard University, and MIT. It was a precursor to the commercial internet, formed after DARPA announced plans to dismantle the ARPANET. ARPANET then accounted for 71 of the consortium's 258 host connections.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dennis Jennings (Internet pioneer)</span>

Dennis M. Jennings is an Irish physicist, academic, Internet pioneer, and venture capitalist. In 1985–1986 he was responsible for three critical decisions that shaped the subsequent development of NSFNET, the network that became the Internet.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Doug Gale</span> American computer scientist

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Douglas Van Houweling</span>

Doug Van Houweling is a professor at the University of Michigan School of Information. He is best known for his contributions to the development and deployment of the Internet. For these accomplishments, he was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2014. He is also the recipient of the EDUCAUSE 2002 Excellence in Leadership Award, the Iowa State University John V. Atanasoff Discovery Award, the Indiana University Thomas Hart Benton Mural Medallion, and an honorary Doctor of Science from Indiana University in May, 2017. Van Houweling was the Associate Dean for Research and Innovation from 2010 to 2014. Prior to that, he was the Dean for Academic Outreach and Vice Provost for Information technology at the University of Michigan.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 "Stephen Wolff Receives the Internet Society's Postel Service Award for 2002", Internet Society, June 24, 2002
  2. ↑ "Biography of Stephen S. Wolff", Session information for the 33rd Asia-Pacific Advanced Network (APAN) meeting in Chiang Mai, Thailand, February 13–17, 2012, accessed August 19, 2012
  3. 1 2 3 "Stephen Wolff -- Hustling for Innovation: Cisco Employee Receives ISOC Award for Contributions to Internet Development" Archived January 20, 2011, at the Wayback Machine , Charles Waltner, Cisco Inc., July 30, 2002.
  4. 1 2 Levine, Yasha (2018). "The Man Who Privatized the Internet". Surveillance valley: the secret military history of the internet. New York: PublicAffairs. ISBN   9781610398022. When I spoke to Wolff, I asked, "Is it right to call you the man who privatized the Internet?" "Yes, that is a fair assessment," he replied.
  5. ↑ Banks, Michael. On the Way to the Web. New York: Apress, 2008.
  6. ↑ Cerf, Vinton, et al. "A Brief History of the Internet". Internet Society. December 10, 2003.
  7. ↑ Bass, Ryan. "Steve Wolff Named New Internet2 Interim Vice President and Chief Technology Officer". March 31, 2011.
  8. ↑ "Stephen Wolff | Internet Hall of Fame". www.internethalloffame.org. Retrieved May 17, 2021.
  9. ↑ "2013 INTERNET HALL of FAME INDUCTEES | Internet Hall of Fame". www.internethalloffame.org. Retrieved May 17, 2021.
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