David Howard Crocker is an American network engineer, known for his work on the development of networked

email Electronic mail (usually shortened to email; alternatively hyphenated e-mail) is a method of transmitting and receiving Digital media, digital messages using electronics, electronic devices over a computer network. It was conceived in the ...

since the early 1970s, when he worked with

ARPANET 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 tec ...

(which became the technical foundation of the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the Global network, global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a internetworking, network of networks ...

) while he was an undergraduate student at

UCLA The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Its academic roots were established in 1881 as a normal school then known as the southern branch of the C ...

. He was introduced to the ARPANET work by his brother,

Steve Crocker Stephen D. Crocker (born October 15, 1944) is an American Internet pioneer. In 1969, he created the ARPA "Network Working Group" and the Request for Comments series. He served as chair of the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Nam ...

, another pioneer of the Internet, who created the ARPA Network Working Group and the

Request for Comments A Request for Comments (RFC) is a publication in a series from the principal technical development and standards-setting bodies for the Internet, most prominently the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). An RFC is authored by individuals or ...

(RFC) series of formally published documents in 1969. Crocker earned a

Bachelor of Arts A Bachelor of Arts (abbreviated B.A., BA, A.B. or AB; from the Latin ', ', or ') is the holder of a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate program in the liberal arts, or, in some cases, other disciplines. A Bachelor of Arts deg ...

degree in

Psychology Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Its subject matter includes the behavior of humans and nonhumans, both consciousness, conscious and Unconscious mind, unconscious phenomena, and mental processes such as thoughts, feel ...

at UCLA in 1975. He became a researcher at

RAND Corporation The RAND Corporation, doing business as RAND, is an American nonprofit global policy think tank, research institute, and public sector consulting firm. RAND engages in research and development (R&D) in several fields and industries. Since the ...

Los Angeles Los Angeles, often referred to by its initials L.A., is the List of municipalities in California, most populous city in the U.S. state of California, and the commercial, Financial District, Los Angeles, financial, and Culture of Los Angeles, ...

while pursuing a master's degree. While there, he designed the "MS" Personal Messaging System. Following shortly after UCLA, RAND was one of a handful of places that had the earliest nodes of the Internet. In 1977 he obtained a

Master of Arts A Master of Arts ( or ''Artium Magister''; abbreviated MA or AM) is the holder of a master's degree awarded by universities in many countries. The degree is usually contrasted with that of Master of Science. Those admitted to the degree have ...

degree at the USC Annenberg School for Communication, now called

USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism The USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism is a part of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. It has 2,300 undergraduate and graduate students. Willow Bay is the dean. Prof. Hector Amaya is the Director of the Sc ...

. While doing additional graduate studies in

Computer Science Computer science is the study of computation, information, and automation. Computer science spans Theoretical computer science, theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, and information theory) to Applied science, ...

at the

University of Delaware The University of Delaware (colloquially known as UD, UDel, or Delaware) is a Statutory college#Delaware, privately governed, state-assisted Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Newark, Delaware, United States. UD offers f ...

, from 1978 to 1982, he developed

MMDF MMDF, the Multichannel Memorandum Distribution Facility, is a message transfer agent (MTA), a computer program designed to transmit email. History MMDF was originally developed at the University of Delaware in the late 1970s, and provided the init ...

, a

message transfer agent Within the Internet email system, a message transfer agent (MTA), mail transfer agent, or mail relay is software that transfers electronic mail messages from one computer to another using the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. In some contexts, the a ...

program for email servers. He ran MMDF as a telephone-based ARPANET gateway service for

CSNET 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 ...

, which was a forerunner for

NSFNET 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 ...

. Crocker was the author of

RFC 822 Electronic mail (usually shortened to email; alternatively hyphenated e-mail) is a method of transmitting and receiving digital messages using electronic devices over a computer network. It was conceived in the late–20th century as the ...

, which was published in 1982 to define the format of Internet mail messages, and he was the first listed author of the earlier RFC 733 on which it was based in 1977. By 1974, the year before he obtained his bachelor's degree, he had been listed as an author or credited by name in at least 19 RFCs (351, 352, 462, 498, 539, 560, 577, 581, 585, 615, 645, and 651 through 658), most of which were focused on email or the

Telnet Telnet (sometimes stylized TELNET) is a client-server application protocol that provides access to virtual terminals of remote systems on local area networks or the Internet. It is a protocol for bidirectional 8-bit communications. Its main ...

protocol for client/server computer terminal communication. He was co-architect and Director of System Development at MCI Digital Information Services Company on the

MCI Mail MCI Mail was one of the first commercial email services in the United States and predates the widespread adoption of the Internet. History The MCI Mail service was launched on September 23, 1983, in Washington, D.C., during a press conference that ...

service, and worked there with

Vint Cerf Vinton Gray Cerf (; born June 23, 1943) is an American Internet pioneer and is recognized as one of "the fathers of the Internet", sharing this title with TCP/IP co-developer Robert Kahn. He has received honorary degrees and awards that inclu ...

to build it into a national email service. After working at MCI from 1983 to 1985, he held networking-related engineering management positions at

Ungermann-Bass Ungermann-Bass, Inc., also known as UB and UB Networks, was a computer networking company in the 1980s to 1990s. Located in Santa Clara, California, UB was the first large networking company independent of any computer manufacturer. Along with co ...

The Wollongong Group The Wollongong Group, Inc. (TWG), was one of the first companies to sell commercial software products based on the Unix operating system. It was founded to market a port of Unix Version 6 developed by researchers at the University of Wollongong, Au ...

, and

Digital Equipment Corporation Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president until ...

, before founding his own consultancy company, Brandenburg InternetWorking, in 1991. Since founding Brandenburg InternetWorking, he has had a role in founding several other companies and the

Internet Mail Consortium The Internet Mail Consortium (IMC) was an organization between 1996 and 2002 that claimed to be the only international organization focused on cooperatively managing and promoting the rapidly expanding world of electronic mail on the Internet. P ...

. He was one of the original

IETF The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a standards organization for the Internet standard, Internet and is responsible for the technical standards that make up the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP). It has no formal membership roster ...

Area Directors, serving from 1989–1995.

Awards and Honors

Crocker received the 2004

IEEE Internet Award IEEE Internet Award is a Technical Field Award established by the IEEE in June 1999. The award is sponsored by Nokia Corporation. It may be presented annually to an individual or up to three recipients, for exceptional contributions to the ad ...

along with

Raymond Tomlinson Raymond Samuel Tomlinson (April 23, 1941 – March 5, 2016) was an American computer scientist who implemented the first email program on the ARPANET system, the precursor to the Internet, in 1971; it was the first system able to send mail betw ...

for their work on the "conceptualization, first implementation, and standardization of networked email".

References

External links

Personal web page

Dave Crocker at ICANNWiki

Datatracker at IETF
for his email address used since 1992 {{DEFAULTSORT:Crocker, Dave American computer programmers Living people University of Delaware alumni University of California, Los Angeles alumni Internet pioneers

Awards and Honors

See also

References

External links