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
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.
It's important for users to understand what risks they face and try to help them identify which software is likely to be problematic.
Why would they be soliciting the opinion of a pun writer about this?
We risk losing the Internet as a catalyst for consumer choice, for economic growth, for technological innovation and for global competitiveness.
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.
For systems in which you already have a lot of hardware and software, change is difficult. That's why apps are so popular.
I wore a coat and tie all through high school: my way of being rebellious in the late 1950s.
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.
The big deal about the Internet design was you could have an arbitrary large number of networks so that they would all work together.
The first commercial routers came out about 1986, and services came in 1987.
Will we shoot virtually at each other over the Internet? Probably not. On the other hand, there may be wars fought about the Internet.
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.
Choosing a single most important development is incredibly hard to do because a lot of different things had to happen before the Internet could be deployed in the fashion it is today.
Given that my title at Google is Chief Internet Evangelist, I feel like there is this great challenge before me because we have three billion users, and there are seven billion people in the world.