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
The closer you look at something, the more complex it seems to be.
I was very nervous about going up to teach at Stanford and very nervous even about going to ARPA.
I'm projecting somewhere between 100 million and 200 million computers on the Net by the end of December 2000, and about 300 million users by that same time.
The computer would do anything you programmed it to do.
There's a tremendous amount of energy in Japan and, increasingly, in China.
My belief is that there will be very large numbers of Internet-enabled devices on the Net - home appliances, office equipment, things in the car and maybe things that you carry around. And since they're all on the Internet and Internet-enabled, they'll be manageable through the network, and so we'll see people using the Net and applications on the Net to manage their entertainment systems, manage their, you know, office activities and maybe even much of their social lives using systems on the Net that are helping them perform that function.
Those are all computational engines that are highly distributed and therefore highly robust, .. We're seeing a very significant evolution in the way we even think about computer systems, let alone specific applications.
There is an underlying, fundamental reliance on the Internet, which continues to grow in the number of users, country penetration and both fixed and wireless broadband access.
I no longer give Power Point presentations, because I've come to believe that power corrupts, and Power Point corrupts absolutely.
There are things that have excited me to no end, and it's the sharing of knowledge that has come about on the network, and I see at an increasing pace this ability to share what we know.
We live in a very complex world.
There's an old maxim that says, 'Things that work persist,' which is why there's still Cobol floating around.
On email and the first instance of spam: This is not for advertising! This is for serious work!
People's motivations haven't changed in maybe 400 or maybe 4,000 years.