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
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.
The Internet of Things tell us that a lot of computer-enabled appliances and devices are going to become part of this system, too: appliances that you use around the house, that you use in your office, that you carry around with yourself or in the car. That's the Internet of Things that's coming.
The internet has become one of the motors of the 21st century economy, allowing all of us to reach a global audience at a click of a mouse and creating hundreds of thousands of businesses and millions of jobs.
To be honest, I joined Facebook as an experiment. I accepted all invitations just to see how many people would ask to be 'friends' - it quickly overwhelmed my time to process even the invitations and requests, let alone to actually go there and do anything.
Yet in all those cases I finally steeled myself to seize the opportunity, and find a way to muddle through and eventually conclude that I had, in fact, chosen the right path, as risky as it seemed at the time.
Commercialization of assets off the planet would mutually reinforce the growth of interplanetary communication.
We have already discovered how quickly we become dependent on the Internet and its applications for business, government and research, so it is not surprising that we are finding that we can apply this technology to enable or facilitate our social interactions as well.
In the earliest days, this was a project I worked on with great passion because I wanted to solve the Defense Department's problem: it did not want proprietary networking and it didn't want to be confined to a single network technology.
The more we can organize, find and manage information, the more effectively we can function in our modern world.
We've never lived in an environment in which it has been so easy to capture information and share it. That fact that it is digital and easy to transmit exacerbates that. I don't know that we know yet what social norms we wish to adopt.
There's nothing special about wireless networks except that wireless capacity is sometimes less than what you can get, for example, from optical fiber.