Recently on CBS' "60 Minutes," Leslie Stahl reported on the Conficker worm and computer security in general.

As part of the report, she interviewed a balding, bearded, well-dressed, kind-looking gentleman identified as a Google vice president and chief Internet evangelist.

Many probably did not know who Vint Cerf was when they saw him. He is quiet-spoken and reserved. But he is to the world of the Internet what Mick Jagger is to the world of rock -- a superstar.

Vinton Gray Cerf has been called "Father of the Internet," a title he objects to although he has said he might qualify as one of the Internet's fathers along with others.

Mr. Cerf has been involved in the Internet from its beginnings. As a grad student at UCLA, he worked in Professor Leonard Kleinrock's data packet networking group that made the first two connections to the ARPANet, the military-sponsored predecessor to the Internet. If that's not present at the birth, I don't know what is.

When Robert E. Kahn was working on a seminal problem of networking, how to allow two networks of differing specifications to communicate, Mr. Cerf joined the effort. The two of them devised a common internetwork protocol that relied on the host computers rather than the network for reliability.

The result of Mr. Kahn's and Mr. Cerf's work was TCP/IP, a very robust network protocol that some say will run over "two tin cans and a string." It has become an underpinning of the Internet.

In a humorous April 1 posting emphasizing how versatile TCP/IP was, someone suggested an IP network using homing pigeons. In 2001, a Linux user group built such a network. They sent nine packets over a distance of approximately 3 miles, each carried by an individual pigeon and containing one ping (a request for a response from a "server") and received four "responses."

But on to more serious matters.

Mr. Cerf's group at Stanford did pioneering work on developing the router, a computer with an interface to different networks that forwards packets of information back and forth between them.

For their work Mr. Cerf and Mr. Kahn received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2005. Mr, Cerf has received numerous other awards including the Turing Prize.

After a stint with the Pentagon, Mr. Cerf joined MCI in 1982 and directed the engineering of MCI Mail, the first commercial e-mail service to be connected to the Internet.

But like so many polymaths, Mr. Cerf has wide interests. Hard of hearing himself, he served on the board of trustees of Gallaudet University, an institution dedicated to the education of the deaf and hard of hearing.

He also is working with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory on the interplanetary Internet, a new standard for communication from planet to planet using radio/laser methods that are highly tolerant to signal degradation.

In an interview with Esquire magazine, Mr. Cerf said about the beginnings of the Internet: "There was no one 'Ah-ha!' moment. Not in the sense that many people want to hear. They see the Internet now and think, 'Well, 36 years ago someone imagined what it would look like in 2008, and that is what drove the process.' It wasn't like that at all."

He went on to say: "There was a first 'Oh, no!' moment. That was the first time I saw spam pop up. It could have been as early as '79. A digital-equipment corporation sent a note around announcing a job opening, and we all blew up, saying, 'This is not for advertising! This is for serious work!' "

We wonder what Mr. Cerf will say when he sees the first piece of interplanetery spam.

If you are interested in the history of the Internet, an excellent boos is "Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet" by Katie Hafner.