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Flag day
ARPANET officially becomes the internet with the adoption of a new protocol stack called TCP/IP, proposed and standardized by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn. While there is some debate over who deserves credit for creating the internet (looking at you Al Gore), I believe these two men contributed more than anyone else. -
Domain Name System (DNS)
DNS was created by Paul Mockapetris to function as a global registry for domain names and their corresponding IP addresses. When you type a domain name into your browser and press enter, your computer first uses DNS to resolve the domain name into an IP address, which it then uses to contact the appropriate server. -
Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC)
ECC was invented by Neal Koblitz and Victor S. Miller in 1985. ECC uses elliptic curves and the properties of the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem to provide significantly more security to network encrypted traffic with very little additional processing power. -
X.509 Public key infrastructure
The International Telecommunication Union developed and standardized X.509 to solve a key problem in cryptography: key exchange between parties over untrusted networks. The X.509 standard is used in almost all public/private key pairs in use today (including in your web browser right now). -
Border Gateway Protocol (BGP)
Yakov Rekhter invented BGP, which was critical in increasing the internet's scalability and resiliency. BGP distributes instructions to routers that tell them where to send data.