Van Jacobson
loreThe author of Congestion Avoidance and Control, the 1988 work that gave TCP the algorithms - slow start, congestion avoidance, fast retransmit - that stopped the internet collapsing under its own load.
In the mid-1980s the network suffered congestion collapse: throughput between two sites fell by three orders of magnitude, because every sender responded to loss by retransmitting harder. His fix was to make each sender infer the state of a network it cannot see, from the only evidence it has - the timing and loss of its own packets - and to back off. That inference is still what every TCP connection does. It is also why a link can be busy while nothing feels fast, and why bufferbloat took decades to be recognised as the same problem wearing a different hat. He was in the inaugural 2012 class of the Internet Hall of Fame, inducted as an Innovator - the category for people whose contribution was a new use rather than the underlying architecture, which is a fair description of making an existing protocol survive its own success.
Also known as: jacobson, congestion avoidance