NANOG's video: Internet Innovators - Steve Crocker

Steve Crocker is known as the man who wrote the instructions for the Internet - in his twenties. But at one time, he was just a young graduate student trying to solve a set of problems. “We knew we didn’t know all the answers - we were not going to design a complete system, we were going to design a toolkit,” Crocker said of the “informal group” which included life-long friend Vint Cerf and other now-famous Internet pioneers. In fact, Crocker said when he was given the “clerical task” of writing down what they were doing, he had many a sleepless night. “I was fearful the mere act of writing down what we were thinking about might trigger a backlash,” he continued. “No one had chartered us, we had no authority. I was afraid it might seem like we were being presumptuous - like we were insisting that we were in charge. It caused a number of sleepless nights,” he said.