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 time is now to think beyond the Earth. Lest you think this is all fantasy, let me assure you that it is quite real.
Allowing broadband carriers to control what people see and do online would fundamentally undermine the principles that have made the Internet such a success.
Geographically indexed databases are going to be extremely valuable over time for people who are in mobile operations.
Putting in capacity (in a business) that's exponentially growing means putting more capacity than expected so you don't get overrun by demand. You have to stay ahead of it.
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.
I'm disappointed in people in general.
This is a place that's just full of creative energy, and I like places like that,
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.
Because when these DDOS attacks swamp access lines, then filtering at the other end doesn't help.
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.
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.
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's Chief Internet Evangelist, which suggests I should go from three-piece suits to some sort of ecclesiastical robes.
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.