Vint Cerf
Vint Cerf
Vinton Gray Cerf ForMemRS,is an American Internet pioneer, who is recognized as one of "the fathers of the Internet", sharing this title with TCP/IP co-inventor Bob Kahn and packet switching inventors Paul Baran and Donald Davies, among others. His contributions have been acknowledged and lauded, repeatedly, with honorary degrees and awards that include the National Medal of Technology, the Turing Award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Marconi Prize and membership in the National Academy of Engineering...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth23 June 1943
CountryUnited States of America
By 1988, I'm seeing this commercial phenomenon beginning to show up. Hardware makers are selling routers to universities so they can build up their campus networks. So I remember thinking, 'Well, how are we going to get this in the hands of the general public?' There were no public Internet services at that point.
Will we shoot virtually at each other over the Internet? Probably not. On the other hand, there may be wars fought about the Internet.
The first commercial routers came out about 1986, and services came in 1987.
The big deal about the Internet design was you could have an arbitrary large number of networks so that they would all work together.
It seems pretty clear that the Internet has an important economic role to play for China as it reaches out to the rest of the world.
I wore a coat and tie all through high school: my way of being rebellious in the late 1950s.
I used to tell jokes about Internet-enabled lightbulbs. I can't tell jokes about it anymore - there already is an Internet-connected lightbulb.
For systems in which you already have a lot of hardware and software, change is difficult. That's why apps are so popular.
Writing software is a very intense, very personal thing. You have to have time to work your way through it, to understand it. Then debug it.
We risk losing the Internet as a catalyst for consumer choice, for economic growth, for technological innovation and for global competitiveness.
Global standards and interoperability are very powerful concepts. They drove the Internet, and they could drive the development of RFID. If we have a lot of incompatible things, their value will drop significantly.
For the last decade, we have been amazed and delighted by what we can do online. And yet people feel increasingly powerless to stop unscrupulous individuals and companies from infecting their computers with programs that they didn't request. The providers of Internet services and software simply must get this problem under control so the users can realize the full potential of their access to the Internet.
In 1970, there was a single telephone company in the United States called AT&T, and its technology was called circuit switching, and that was all any telecom engineer worried about.
In a town of 3,000 people, there is no privacy. Everybody knows what everybody is doing.