Vinton Cerf
Vinton 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...
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth23 June 1943
CityNew Haven, CT
It's Chief Internet Evangelist, which suggests I should go from three-piece suits to some sort of ecclesiastical robes.
It's conceivable that the IPN could go like its terrestrial counterpart, starting out as a network supporting scientific research and eventually evolving into something of commercial interest,
when we do get to the point where we need all the services in space that we have become accustomed to on Earth.
There are a plethora of domain name servers which are below our level of visibility, and we have nothing to say about how those machines are operated.
Allowing broadband carriers to control what people see and do online would fundamentally undermine the principles that have made the Internet such a success.
Al Gore actually deserves a lot of credit. In about 1986, he started asking questions like, 'Why don't we take these supercomputers and these optical fiber networks and put them together. Would that do anything?' Well, guess what? That eventually turned into the National Science Foundation Network, which became a core element of the Internet.
This medium will enjoy wider-spread use than television, radio or phones, and will ultimately expand beyond planet Earth,
This is a place that's just full of creative energy, and I like places like that,
This is not a new interest for me, ... It's just that I've spent the last decade or so working more on basic Internet infrastructure evolution at MCI. But I've been increasingly interested in focusing back on the application level, higher layer stuff. So this is a wonderful opportunity to pursue that.
Of course, you do have to get accustomed to being satisfied a little bit at second-hand by people who actually do some of the key work.
If it didn't work, then we couldn't have built the Internet.
People need to be exposed to what the various problems are in various parts of the business. And you can become isolated from that in a large company.
Because when these DDOS attacks swamp access lines, then filtering at the other end doesn't help.
These people just don't know you can't do that. So they just go out and do it. That's the great thing of working with all these new folks.