Vint Cerf is an awesome individual:

For the past five decades, Cerf, now 79, has been perfecting, extending, and evangelizing the Internet. It is for this—his contributions in cocreating the Internet architecture and his leadership in its growth to date—that Cerf is the recipient of the 2023 IEEE Medal of Honor. The award is sponsored by the IEEE Foundation.

Source: Meet Mr. Internet: Vint Cerf – IEEE Spectrum

I met him in the 1990s. He’s cool.

And while name dropping, I’ve also met Leonard Kleinrock, Andrew Virterbi and Bill Gates, and worked with Bob Frankston.  One of my managers (a PhD in EE) was, for a time, living with Donald Knuth. One of my colleagues at another job, had connected the 4th computer to the Arpanet earlier in his career. And in the 1980s, I stood next to Steve Jobs but we were waiting for something and didn’t speak with each other.

Coldstreams