I did not create TCP/IP. What became TCP/IP was proposed in the mid 1970s by Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn, and they are generally recognized as the "fathers of the Internet". It was published in RFCs in late 1981 and became an official DoD standard in 1983. I discovered it around that time and started evangelizing it heavily, both for general computer networking and especially in amateur radio. This was a controversial idea at the time, and many of us refer to the mid 1980s as the "holy protocol wars". The main point of contention was whether the network layer should be "connectionless" or "connection-oriented". IP is now "the" connectionless network layer, but there were others with very similar designs. And now IP, more accurately known as IPv4, is slowly (very slowly) being replaced with IPv6. Its main feature is a 128-bit address (vs 32 in IPv4), but it is also considerably simpler. We threw out a lot of the complexity in IPv4 that seemed like a good idea at the time, but didn't work too well in practice.
I actually began my software on a dare. When touting TCP/IP for ham use, those who advocated other ideas said it was far too complex for ham use. It was available on mainframes like the DEC PDP-10 and minicomputers like the VAX-11, but it was true that no useful implementations then existed for the small computers then used by hams.
So I started implementing TCP in C just to prove them wrong. My original platform was the Xerox 820, a 64KB Z-80 single board computer available in large quantities for $50 to the ham community. A year or so later I got an IBM PC and moved it to that. And it grew and grew from there.
I like to say that I'm one of a cast of thousands who helped design and build the Internet. And it's true; while a few people like Cerf and Kahn had the original vision, it was a remarkable collaborative effort that could never have been undertaken by a single person or even a small group of people. Good ideas came from many different places, often unexpected.
