CYBER-DADDY; INTERNET FOUNDER GREW UP IN VAN NUYS.

Byline: Ben Sullivan Daily News Staff Writer

Forget cybergeek. It is immediately apparent on meeting Vinton Cerf that he is one cool dude.

In a dark three-piece suit, gold tie with matching handkerchief, and clipped white beard, Cerf looks more GQ than gee-whiz. Yet the dapper 55-year-old is one of two tech-heads who in 1973 came up with TCP/IP, the basic technology that allows the legions of computers that form the Internet to swap data back and forth.

Ironically, writing the empowering protocol wasn't all that hard.

Cerf and fellow Stanford University researcher Robert Kahn banged out a rough version within a few weeks of accepting the challenge from the U.S. Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency. But that groundbreaking work gave the pair something akin to Founding Father status in the computer world, and anyone who has ever sent an e-mail message or checked sports scores from a laptop owes Cerf a debt of thanks.

``He's probably the most widely accepted father of the Internet that we have,'' said Bill Manassero, director of the Software Council of Southern California. ``He is incredibly well-respected in our community and really considered quite a pioneer.''

So what technoburg spawned such a luminary? Palo Alto? Cambridge?

Try Van Nuys.

That's right - a Founding Father of the Internet is, or at least was, a Val.

``I lived on Columbus Avenue just north of Vanowen. It used to be a walnut grove and we were the first occupants in our whole housing tract,'' Cerf said on a recent trip to Los Angeles for his employer, Reston, Va.-based MCI-WorldCom Inc.

The son of an aerospace administrator, Cerf was immersed early on in the world of science and engineering. As a Valley teen, he spent summers interning at his father's employer, North American Aviation, which later became Rockwell International.

``I wound up working in practically every division at North American over the course of many summers,'' Cerf said. ``I was at Rocketdyne twice. I was at Atomics International. Even at their space and information systems division.''

He graduated from Van Nuys High School in 1961 and Stanford University in 1965, and then completed graduate and postgraduate work at University of California, Los Angeles. In 1972, Cerf accepted a professorship at Stanford in a joint appointment to the school's computer science and electrical engineering departments. It was there that he began collaborating with Kahn, who under the auspices of DARPA was developing a method of data transmission known as packet switching.

When two people speak on the phone, they create a closed circuit that uses all the capacity on the phone line to transmit their voices. Packet switching works more like an electronic post office. Each utterance is chopped into hundreds of small electronic post cards that are stamped, addressed and individually sent down the line to the recipient, where they are collected and reassembled in the proper order. Because gaps exist between the post cards, other people can simultaneously send their own cards or ``packets'' on the same line.

It was a concept Kahn proved on ground-, radio- and satellite-based networks for the military. The only trouble was, the three systems had no way to exchange data with each other. Because it revolved around getting separate computer networks to talk, it came to be known as the ``inter-net problem.'' And TCP/IP emerged as the solution.

After 10 years in academia refining the concept on government systems, Cerf joined MCI in 1982 to, in his words, make some money. His early work for the telecom giant was on MCI Mail, the company's trailblazing but proprietary e-mail service.

And other than a six-year stint at the Corporation for National Research Initiatives - to again work with Kahn - he has been at MCI ever since, proselytizing the Internet and nudging it along.

It was Cerf who convinced the government in 1988 to let the first commercial venture, MCI, plug in to the military's Arpanet, arguably marking the true birth of the Internet with a capital I. And it was Cerf who in 1992 founded the nonprofit Internet Society to help set guidelines and standards for the beast he'd helped unleash.

Indeed, the Internet Society may prove to be Cerf's greatest legacy, as he believes enlightened regulation has been and remains key to the Internet's success.

``Right now television, telephony and radio are starting to show up in the middle of the Internet,'' Cerf said. ``In a worst-case scenario, somebody will say: Ah ha! The union of all the regulatory structures established for those media should now be applied to the Internet that's carrying them.''

In fact, Cerf said, the best possible outcome is essentially what the Clinton administration has proffered in the U.S. - a mostly hands-off approach that leaves the bulk of policing to users themselves.

``I don't reject regulation on a dogmatic basis, but I think you need to approach it with some understanding of what you're trying to accomplish, or prevent,'' Cerf said. ``And then you have to ask, can you implement it? The last thing you want to do is create a regulatory framework you can not enforce.''

Part of the problem is that predicting where the Internet will be a decade from now, particularly in the field of commerce, is as impossible as foreseeing in 1973 what the creation of TCP/IP would spawn, Cerf said.

``We're at an incredibly early stage in the evolution of the commercial system,'' he said. ``Companies are still out in exploratory mode, discovering ways to use the Net.''

The efforts he admires most are those like the online auction house EBay, which create the sense of an online community.

Whatever the direction, Cerf is certain the Internet will become far more ubiquitous as the technology advances. And the Net itself will extend beyond the bounds of Earth. One of Cerf's latest projects is collaboration with Pasadena-based Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to create an interplanetary Internet to serve future space travelers.

Reflecting on his role in the evolving Internet revolution, Cerf is all modesty. ``I just happen to be one of the guys that started this thing,'' he said. ``Architecturally, it sort of solved itself.''

Still, he seems to relish the opportunities and, frankly, the fame his efforts have brought.

At a cocktail party in London not long ago, Cerf, an avid science fiction reader, said he found himself before a man whose name tag read Doug Adams. ``I said, Are you the Doug Adams that wrote `Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy?' ''

The man replied he was.

``I said, `Geez, I always wanted to meet you.' Then he looked at my name tag and said, `Are you the guy that did that Internet thing?' I said, `Yeah,' and he said, `Geez, I always wanted to meet you too!' ''

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PHOTO (Color) Dapper dresser Vinton Cerf, Van Nuys High Class of '61 , is one of two people who created the system that made the Internet possible.

Gene Blevins/Special to the Daily News