David H. Crocker

A Senior Advisor of the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group, active in the IETF, and self-employed working under the company name Brandenburg InternetWorking, David H. Crocker designed network-based applications businesses and system architectures. He had forty years of work experience in the Internet industry, including early work with DARPA and designing the basis for today's email system. Crocker was well-known for his work on RFC 822, which was the first standard to describe the syntax of a domain name.

He received his B.A. in Psychology from UCLA in 1975, his M.A. in Communication from Annenberg School, USC in 1977, and pursued Doctoral work in Computer Science from University of Delaware from 1978–1982. He began his networking career in the 1970s, when he worked for four years at UCLA with ARPANET. Crocker served as the Area Director for the IETF from 1989–1996. He participated in the effort to standardize facsimile and electronic data exchange over the Internet, and chaired the Silicon Valley—Public Access Link in the early 1990s.

He also contributed to work on Internet commerce, domain name service, emergency services, and TCP/IP enhancements. Crocker was one of Jon Postel's appointees to the IAHC and taught several classes on Internet, TCP/IP, and Open Systems Networking. From 1989 to 1991, he worked as the Manager of Network Systems Laboratory at Digital Equipment Corporation, prior to which he was the Vice President of Engineering at The Wollongong Group, Inc.

He also held the position of Development Manager at Ungermann-Bass, Inc. and worked as the Director of System Development at MCI Digital Information Services Corp, where he collaborated with Vint Cerf to build a national email service for the company. Prior to this, Crocker worked as the Co-Principal Investigator, Electrical Engineering at University of Delaware. He also served as an Advisor at Goodmail Systems, Co-Founder of Portola Software, an Engineer at Silicon Graphics, and Director at Digital Equipment Corporation.

Crocker was responsible in part for the facilitation and growth of email. He developed MS, based on the design of MSG, which was the first modern email sender program. MS was designed for the UNIX operating system. The idea was initiated by Steve Walker, who was then the Program Manager at DARPA, and Crocker designed the functional specifications while Steve Tepper and Bill Crosby did the programming, reporting to the Rand department head, Bob Anderson.

In 1977, he, along with John Vittal, Kenneth Pogran, and Austin Henderson, worked on a DARPA initiative that was meant to collect various email data formats into a single, coherent specification. The result of their work was RFC 733. In 1982, Crocker revised RFC 733 and prepared RFC 822, which was the first standard to describe the syntax of domain names.

In 1978, he was once again with Dave Farber at the University of Delaware, where they developed the first versions of what would become the Multi-purpose Memo Distribution Facility (MMDF). This project was for the U.S. Army Materiel Command and served as the foundation of CSNet. He developed two national email services and designed two others.

Much of his recent work revolved around email anti-abuse, working towards a trust overlay on the Internet. Crocker was a member of the IETF's administrative and legal oversight bodies (IAOC/Trust), as well as a member of the Association of Computing Machinery, Institute of Electrical & Electronic Engineers, and ISOC. He actively participated in meetings in the Internet industry and chaired and presented at several conferences, including: N+I Interop; Electronic Messaging Association; APRICOT '06, '05, '04, '99; RIPE, Edinburgh; EMail World; Unix Expo; and the FTC email authentication conference in 2004.

He was the author of book chapters, magazine articles, presentations, and specifications on open systems networking, standards, electronic mail, and electronic commerce. A complete list of his presentations and publications can be read at http://www.bbiw.net/musings.html. In 2004, Crocker received the IEEE Internet Award.