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GCN Home > 01/23/06 issue

Vinton Cerf | The search continues

Interview with Vinton Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist for Google Inc.

By Brad Grimes, GCN Staff

Vinton Cerf is sometimes referred to as the Father of the Internet, although he begs to differ. Today he’s Chief Internet Evangelist for a company making more than its share of headlines—a little online search outfit called Google. It’s been quite a ride.

During the 1970s, while a professor at his alma mater, Stanford University, Cerf performed some of the earliest work on the TCP/IP protocols. During that time, he and Robert Kahn, who had worked together on ARPANET, the first packet-switched network, began thinking about how to connect various networks into a large one. They were reunited in 1976 at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to do just that.

Since then Cerf has, among other things, pioneered commercial e-mail service at MCI, joined the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (which oversees Net addresses) and, along with Kahn, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President George W. Bush. Still, Cerf seemingly remains in awe of current technology. He told GCN, “I believe that 99 percent of the Internet’s applications have yet to be invented.”

GCN: When you were at DARPA, did you have any idea what the Internet would look like today Cerf: We had a very clear view of the functionality we wanted from the Internet, including the ability to support command and control, through computers, that was resilient even in the face of nuclear disruption. DARPA supported work at SRI International, for example, that presaged the Web, namely Doug Engelbart’s Augmentation of Human Intellect efforts, and Packet Speech at the [University of California Information Sciences Institute] and Lincoln Laboratory that experimented with VOIP and packet video. So we had a fair idea of what the technology could support, but I think we were not able to envision what would happen when a billion users started sharing their information through this network.

More news on related topics: IPv6, Management, IT Management, Web Strategies



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