Pioneer never stops in his drive for Net innovation

Stephen Crocker is restless. The Internet pioneer is in his dining room, drinking a large cup of Dunkin' Donuts coffee -- the grinding, dripping coffee machine in the kitchen is "too complicated," he says -- and itching to check his e-mail. He dashes downstairs to his computer cluster. Then he returns.

Crocker, who in 1969 developed many of the rules for how host computers communicate with each other on a network that became the Internet, has lived in his Bethesda, Md., home for 13 years but in many rooms it looks more like 13 weeks. There is a hole in the kitchen ceiling. Framed prints sit on the living room floor, propped against the walls. If there was any effort at decorating, it was halfhearted.

"We don't really entertain here," said Crocker, 57. "My wife says we live like graduate students."

Millionaire graduate students.

Freedom and independence

Some members of the tight-knit club that gave birth to the Internet have settled into executive positions in the corporate world they transformed. Others have landed sinecures in universities where their long hours of toil yielded the world's first remote computer network.

Crocker wants both: the freedom of the academic lifestyle, and the financial independence of the executive suite.

The former UCLA graduate student is something of an anomaly: an Internet pioneer who still has his cards in the start-up game. In the past eight years, Crocker has launched five companies: CyberCash, an Internet payment systems provider; Steve Crocker Associates, a technology consulting firm; Executive DSL, a high-speed Internet service; Longitude Systems, a telecommunications software maker; and his most recent venture, Shinkuro Inc., which is developing data-sharing software.

"I am a lot more driven by the problem than the running of the company. I am always amused when I hear about people who jump from CEO position to CEO position," Crocker said. "That is not how I come at the world."

To put it another way, Crocker is seduced by ideas. When the ideas become companies and the companies become operational, he becomes restless.

Vint Cerf, senior vice president of WorldCom and Crocker's best friend since high school, regards his pal as afflicted with "start-up-itis": "He loves a feast of ideas."

Bypassing servers

Shinkuro, which Crocker incorporated in February with software designer Jeffrey Kay, is developing what is known as peer-to-peer file-sharing technology that would cut network servers out of the equation, allowing, for example, the computer networks at two merging companies to interact directly.

"Most of us kind of feel that our personal identity rises and falls with a company and its fate, but Steve doesn't confuse the two. He doesn't invest it with ego," said William Melton, a venture capitalist and former CyberCash chief executive. "He starts out from the place of being a puzzle solver and the companies are a vehicle through which he can do that."

To the computer-science graduate students of the 1960s, Crocker is one of the fathers of the Internet, credited with writing and assembling the first protocols, a set of common operating terms that allow communication between computers. To the second generation of Internet builders, he is known as a security expert, heralded for building software that protects the integrity of networks. And to the venture capitalists of today, he is seen as a mind worth betting on, the entrepreneur who might have the next big idea.

For the past 30 years, Crocker has lived in a small world of Internet pioneers whose inhabitants are intimately familiar with each other's work. They were computer geeks, by and large, restless graduate students prone to all-nighters in the late 1960s.

"These are the people who were and are active in defining the protocols, which is to say, the people who guided the way the Internet works," said Joel Halpern, who worked with Crocker at UCLA in the 1960s and co-founded Longitude. "And in this community, Steve is known as the guy who everyone went to talk to."

Ferreting out flaws

That reputation was earned at UCLA, where Crocker was known as a fastidious programmer with the patience to sit down for hours with peers until he could ferret out the flaws in their software designs.

His stature as the computer world's consensus-maker was amplified when the federal government prepared to launch the ARPAnet in 1968. The project took its title from the agency that paid for it, the Defense Department's Advanced Research Project Agency. The military wanted to connect costly computers in a real-time network.

"It was an adventure that just expanded rapidly and allowed lots of people to play important roles," Crocker said. "There was no one thing that made the Internet successful. There were layers and layers of technology."

The plan was to link four institutions: UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, the University of California at Santa Barbara and the University of Utah. The challenge for Crocker, Cerf and their UCLA classmates was to write software that would allow host computers throughout the network to converse, a tall order in the era before a standard operating system.

Crocker's answer was a letter titled "Request for Comments," which summarized the work that had been done and solicited ideas for the emerging network. Everyone who saw it read the same underlying message: The ARPAnet would be built through open communication and collective agreement among programmers. It stuck. More than 3,200 requests for comments, each shaping the Internet, have been produced since.

Within 10 years, ARPAnet would give way to the Internet, not a single network but an open-ended connection of smaller networks, each separately administered but adhering to the protocols Crocker first assembled.

'Consummate nerds'

Crocker grew up in California's San Fernando Valley, just north of Los Angeles. He and Vint Cerf, wiry high school whiz kids, spent most of their time in the math club. "We were nerds. We were consummate nerds," Cerf said.

Van Nuys High School was a breeding ground for future ARPAnet stars. Besides Cerf and Crocker there was Jon Postel, who joined them at UCLA and developed a method for organizing Internet domain addresses. All three were present in September 1969 when the first host computers were networked.

Crocker moved east and worked in the artificial intelligence laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a time, but that did not capture his imagination. California called him back. He completed his dissertation at UCLA.

Crocker spent the next two decades skipping around the edges of the Internet. He was a manager at ARPA, opened a laboratory at the Aerospace Corp. in El Segundo, Calif., and opened a West Coast office for Trusted Information Systems Inc., an early leader in the firewall business.

By the early 1990s, Crocker was an established voice in the Internet security industry. He was appointed area director for security at the Internet Engineering Task Force, an outgrowth of the requests for comments that develops agreements on the format of Internet communication.

He invokes a bygone era of big ideas.

"At the height of the Internet boom period, there was a very firm focus on hyper-growth and getting to the market first," he said. "There was no way to know in advance how much something was worth. If you try to sketch out what works, it's impossible. But sometimes the concept is right."