Stephen Wolff

Stephen Wolff is one of the many fathers of the Internet. He is mainly credited with turning the Internet from a government project into something that proved to have both 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 the commercial world.

Wolff taught Electrical Engineering in The Johns Hopkins University, and subsequently spent fourteen years managing a computing and communications research group at the US Army Ballistic Research Laboratory, which (among other things) ported Berkeley UNIX to a variety of computers of the day including the Denelcor HEP, an early supercomputer; the group also participated in the development and deployment of the ARPANET.

In 1986, Wolff was appointed Division Director for Networking and Communications Research and Infrastructure at the National Science Foundation, where he managed the NSFNET project. That included a national backbone network in the US that interconnected NSF sponsored supercomputing centers, regional research and education networks, federal agency networks, and international research and education networks. The regional networks connected to the backbone and in turn interconnected the nation’s colleges, universities, and other public institutions and so provided universal connectivity to the academic community. The NSFNET connected to the ARPANET by adopting the TCP/IP protocols, which became the de facto standard of the nascent Internet.

In 1994, Wolff left NSF and joined Cisco, where he continued to support academic networking research and infrastructure. From 2011 until his retirement in 2017 he served as Interim Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, and later Chief Scientist at Internet2, a not-for-profit technology company that provides a backbone network and related services for US higher education.