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
Written communication is a tremendous help for me, and so when electronic mail was invented in '71, I got very excited about it, thinking well, gee, the deaf community could really use this, or the hard of hearing community as well.
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.
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,
It took 30 years to get the Internet to where we are now. Thirty years from now, we have to assume there will be colonies on the moon, colonies on Mars and other planets and research stations all over.
don't know you can't do that, so they go of and do it.
The time is now to think beyond the Earth. Lest you think this is all fantasy, let me assure you that it is quite real.
I started thinking about the past 25 years as the Internet evolved, and I thought, 'Gee, what should we be doing now so that in another 25 years, we are ready for whatever's coming?'
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.
So one of the most important things we can do in the industry is make sure that the threat of cyberattacks is minimized as much as possible.
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 is a place that's just full of creative energy, and I like places like that,
The structure of the W3C didn't lend itself to quite the degree of freedom to contribute that the IETF does. We found it difficult to get points across and to influence what was happening.