Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet
by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon · 1 Jan 1996 · 352pp · 96,532 words
Interface Message Processor to California the next day. IMP Number One was almost out the door. 5 Do It to It Truett Steve Crocker and Vint Cerf had been best friends since attending Van Nuys High School in L.A.’s San Fernando Valley. They shared a love for science, and the
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of the term “packet-switching,” had come over from England to see how this would all work out. “It was just an amazing experience,” said Vint Cerf. “Hacking away and hollering and screaming and saying, ‘No, no . . . you got this one wrong. ’Getting all the details right.” At the end of Saturday
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the time of the 1972 ICCC demonstration in Washington, the leaders of several national networking projects had formed an International Network Working Group (INWG), with Vint Cerf in charge. Packet-switching network projects in France and England were producing favorable results. Donald Davies’s work at the U.K.’s National Physical
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collaboration that Bob Kahn would characterize years later as the most satisfying of his professional career took place over several months in 1973. Kahn and Vint Cerf had first met during the weeks of testing at UCLA in early 1970, when they had forced the newborn ARPANET into catatonia by overloading the
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their own pockets. Typical charges were between $20,000 and $50,000 per year for a high-speed connection. TCP/IP versus OSI In 1982 Vint Cerf announced that he was going to leave ARPA to take a job at MCI. Earlier that year he had met an MCI executive whose job
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promote TCP/IP, it was Cerf. The magic of the Internet was that its computers used a very simple communications protocol. And the magic of Vint Cerf, a colleague once remarked, was that he cajoled and negotiated and urged user communities into adopting it. While at MCI in 1983, building what was
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’s first RFC for the Network Working Group, and continued into the Internet. While at DARPA, Bob Kahn made a conspicuous choice to maintain openness. Vint Cerf gave the Net its civility. And the creators of the Net still ran the Internet Society and attended meetings of the Internet Engineering Task Force
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an elaborate video presentation that would include interviews with a core group of pioneers—Larry Roberts, Bob Kahn, Steve Crocker, Len Kleinrock, Frank Heart, and Vint Cerf. Bob Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet, was now publisher of a computer trade newspaper called InfoWorld. He wrote an opinion column on the upcoming event
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most TCP/IP traffic is carried by Ethernet, which I invented . . . As the party peaks, I’ll see how much credit I can grab from Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn for the invention of internetworking . . . Failing that, I’ll see if I can smile my way into the group photo of the
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the remotest corners of the San Francisco Bay Area. For years Ornstein stayed off the Net, and for years he eschewed e-mail. Of everyone, Vint Cerf was perhaps the most celebrated this weekend. He was the person most of the press turned to for quotes on the Internet’s origins. In
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company’s Internet businesses. His reputation was well known throughout the company. At an MCI operations center in North Carolina someone had hung a sign: “Vint Cerf is the Father of the Internet, but we’re the mothers that have to make it work!” As Saturday’s dinner approached, there was a
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. Some material was taken from interviews conducted by the Charles Babbage Institute. The description of the evolution of TCP/IP was based on interviews with Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn, John Shoch, Alex McKenzie, and Jon Postel. The description of the origins of Ethernet was based on interviews with Bob Metcalfe. Butler Lampson
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the telephone explaining, among other technical points, how routing tables and RFNMs work. The following people allowed us to interview them at length: Wes Clark, Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn, Severo Ornstein, Bob Taylor, Larry Roberts, Jon Postel, Frank Heart, Alex McKenzie, Dave Walden, Ben Barker, Donald Davies, Paul Baran, Len Kleinrock, Steve
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concerning NSF’s role in the development of the Internet. The manuscript was read in whole or in part in various stages of completion by Vint Cerf, Lyman Chapin, Steve Crocker, Peter Denning, Frank Heart, Bob Kahn, John Kelley, Larry Landweber, Steven Levy, Hank Long, Paul McJones, Alex McKenzie, Peter Preuss, Larry
Open Standards and the Digital Age: History, Ideology, and Networks (Cambridge Studies in the Emergence of Global Enterprise)
by Andrew L. Russell · 27 Apr 2014 · 675pp · 141,667 words
(end-to-end protocol) was also waiting and Mr OKABE [the secretary of the meeting] objected to distribute it, since the cover letter sent by Vint CERF mentioned that this document had not yet been submitted to the agreement of W.G.6.1.” Pouzin, clearly annoyed, concluded pessimistically. “The going is
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the “datagram guru.”87 Pouzin had been cast as Socrates, and the French PTT and Ministry of Industry administered the hemlock. Conclusions The departure of Vint Cerf from INWG, together with the political termination of the Cyclades project, meant that INWG’s prominent role as a forum for networking discussions ground to
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; Donald Davies, “CCITT Contribution by IFIP WG6.1,” August 1974, INWG 69, McKenzie Collection. 38 Vint Cerf, “INWG Meeting in Stockholm, August 10–11, 1974,” April 1, 1974, INWG 53, McKenzie Collection. 39 Cerf, INWG 53; Vint Cerf, “Minutes of the Stockholm Meeting of IFIP WG6.1, August 10–11, 1974 (Aboard the good
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had been revised to include two distinct functions, which Cerf and his colleagues referred to as the Transmission Control Protocol and the Internet Protocol. 58 Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn, “HOST and PROCESS Level Protocols for Internetwork Communication,” September 13, 1973, INWG 39, McKenzie Collection. 59 Louis Pouzin, “A Proposal for Interconnecting
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Packet Switching Networks,” March 1974, INWG 60, McKenzie Collection. On “Catenet,” see also Vint Cerf, “The Catenet Model for Internetworking,” July 1978, Internet Engineering Note 48, http://www.rfc-editor.org/ien/ien48.txt (accessed October 24, 2012). 60 Hubert
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–69. 61 Robert E. Kahn, oral history interview by Judy O’Neill, April 24, 1990, Reston, Virginia. Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. 62 Vint Cerf, Yogen Dalal, and Carl Sunshine (1974), “Specification of Internet Transmission Control Program,” RFC 675, http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc675 (accessed September 25, 2013
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); Vint Cerf, Yogen Dalal, and Carl Sunshine, “Specification of Internet Transmission Control Program,” December 1974, INWG 72, McKenzie Collection. 63 Alex McKenzie, “Internetwork Host-Host Protocol,” December
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and the Conception of the Internet,” 69–70. 64 Louis Pouzin, “Standards in Data Communications and Computer Networks,” March 1975, INWG 79, McKenzie Collection. 65 Vint Cerf, “Minutes of IFIP WG 6.1 Meeting,” May 23, 1975, INWG 88, McKenzie Collection. Larry Roberts, the Arpanet pioneer who was now deeply involved in
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Design Committee responsible for “technical issues in the design of an internetwork communication protocol.” 68 Louis Pouzin and Vint Cerf, “Vote for a Basic End-to-End Protocol,” May 1975, INWG 85, McKenzie Collection. 69 Vint Cerf, “GENERAL NOTE #85 on Voting Procedures,” July 1975, INWG 91, McKenzie Collection. 70 Cerf, INWG 91; McKenzie
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,” August 2011, courtesy of the author; McKenzie, “INWG and the Conception of the Internet,” 69. 72 Vint Cerf, Alex McKenzie, Roger Scantlebury, and Hubert Zimmermann, “End-to-End Protocol,” September 4, 1975, INWG 95, McKenzie Collection; Vint Cerf, Alex McKenzie, Roger Scantlebury, and Hubert Zimmermann, “Proposal for an Internetwork End-to-End Protocol,” July
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CCITT Rapporteur Group on Packet Switching – Geneva, 16–19 September, 1975,” INWG 101, McKenzie Collection; Sirbu and Zwimpfer, “The Case of X.25,” 40. 74 Vint Cerf, “End-to-End Protocol Voting Procedure,” December 1, 1975, INWG 102, McKenzie Collection. 75 The fractions occurred because voting privileges were extended only to institutions
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, 1990, Reston, Virginia. Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. 79 Cerf interview, Charles Babbage Institute, 1990. 80 Cerf interview, Charles Babbage Institute, 1990. 81 Vint Cerf, “Report on TC-6 Meeting in Sao Paulo, October 1975,” December 1, 1975, INWG 103, McKenzie Collection; Louis Pouzin, “Chairmanship of WG 6.1,” March
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; Valérie Schafer, “Appropriating Packet Switching Networks, Making Cyclades Network”; Schafer, La France en Reseaux; Després interview, Charles Babbage Institute; Pouzin interview, Charles Babbage Institute. 87 Vint Cerf, quoted in Ian Peter, “Separating TCP and IP,” September 30, 2004, available from http://mailman.postel.org/pipermail/internet-history/2004-September/000431.html (accessed
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21 (1975): 70–72; Abbate, Inventing the Internet, 152–155. 92 Hubert Zimmermann, interview with Mariann Unterluggauer, July 14, 2005, courtesy of Mariann Unterluggauer. 93 Vint Cerf, quoted by Mariann Unterluggauer, “denktage,” December 10, 2007, available from http://motz.antville.org/stories/1734089/ (accessed November 22, 2012). 7 Open Systems and the
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join ISO, except just a few, like John Day. Most of them just stayed out of the process.” He continued, noting the ARPA program managers Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn “had passed contracts to various people here and there to implement [TCP/IP], and probably they were reluctant to see people going
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the OSI model. Some suspected that Zimmermann had simply given up on the prospects for connectionless standards; in fact, Zimmermann was one step ahead. As Vint Cerf later recalled, “He was much more politically astute than I was at that point.” Zimmermann recognized that if he could foster a consensus for the
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avoid the legacy powers, but in the American context the situation was different. It may be the case that the leaders of the Internet community, Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn, anticipated this insight when they stepped back from international negotiations in the late 1970s. In the 1970s and 1980s, they devised their
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how the prevailing imaginaire of the open Internet obscures its autocratic and centralized origins. Internet Protocols and Institutional Evolution, 1975–1992 By the mid-1970s, Vint Cerf was deeply enmeshed in the international community of packet-switching researchers. He was the energetic chairman of the International Network Working Group (INWG) and a
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network.” The resulting effort created more sophisticated and durable institutions – clear indications of the Internet’s growing complexity and maturity.24 Barry Leiner, who replaced Vint Cerf as head of the ARPA Internet program in 1983, assisted Kahn in this rethinking of the Internet’s management. In September 1984, Leiner disbanded the
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raised several technical objections to the adoption of CLNP. It was clear that the protocol would need to be reengineered to suit the Internet, but Vint Cerf and others raised a related procedural question: Would the IETF be able to maintain control over future revisions of CLNP? Perhaps worried about the reaction
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configuration problems.” David A. Mills, oral history interview by Andrew L. Russell, February 26, 2004, Newark, Delaware. Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. 14 Vint Cerf (1989), “The Internet Activities Board,” RFC 1120, http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1120 (accessed September 25, 2013). 15 Robert Taylor, oral history interview by William
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), 229. 17 Lawrence G. Roberts, oral history interview by Arthur L. Norberg, April 4, 1989, San Francisco, California. Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis; Vint Cerf, quoted in Stephen Segaller, Nerds 2.0.1: A Brief History of the Internet (New York: TV Books, 1998), 59. 18 Amy Slaton and Janet
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Networking Style, xv and 11; Mills interview, Charles Babbage Institute. 37 Richard des Jardins, “OSI is (Still) a Good Idea,” ConneXions 6 (1992): 33. 38 Vint Cerf and Kevin Mills (1990), “Explaining the Role of GOSIP,” RFC 1169, http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1169 (accessed September 25, 2013). See also Erik Huizer
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the DNS War, 101–123; Milton L. Mueller, Ruling the Root: Internet Governance and the Taming of Cyberspace (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002); and Vint Cerf, “IETF and the Internet Society,” July 18, 1995, Internet Society, http://www.internetsociety.org/internet/internet-51/history-internet/ietf-and-internet-society (accessed January
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Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). 56 Steve Deering, “Re: IPv7 (CLNP) Is a Mistake,” July 2, 1992; Vint Cerf, “Re: IPv7 == CLNP or CLNP+?,” July 6, 1992; William Allen Simpson, “Lessons – Political,” July 6, 1992; Lyman Chapin, “Re: IPv7 (CLNP a Mistake),” July 6
An Optimist's Tour of the Future
by Mark Stevenson · 4 Dec 2010 · 379pp · 108,129 words
of the men who invented the Internet. As we take seats in the library (it is that kind of neighbourhood) he hands me his card: ‘Vint Cerf. Google. Chief Internet Evangelist.’ ‘I tried for archduke,’ he jokes. The job title, he tells me, is a reflection of the fact that he’s
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. I remember having to meet the Bulgarian president and prime minister and the airline lost my luggage for four days. I got along just fine.’ Vint Cerf: old school, meticulous, playful – and smart as hell. I’m hoping Vint can give me the big picture on our increasing interconnectedness. After all, he
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,’ says Vint. Perhaps this is why staff at the Italian edition of Wired magazine nominated the Internet/Web for the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize and Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn and Tim Berners-Lee to be the recipients if it’s accepted. But connecting people is only a fraction of the Internet’s
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strains of bacteria that, under sunlight, consume CO2 and excrete diesel and ethanol fuels. I whip out my iPhone and find their website, silently thanking Vint Cerf that I can. ‘Joule efficiently captures sunlight to produce energy in liquid form,’ it says, claiming its ‘use of waste CO2 as a sole feedstock
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is doing more with less; energy efficiency across the entire economy.’ Part of that solution will be the ‘Internet of things’ I talked about with Vint Cerf. ‘We’re starting to see smart appliances entering the market,’ Dan said. ‘The more they can talk to each other and your electricity supply about
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loudspeaker he was using to address the crowd was ‘a weapon’). YouTube footage of the arrest soon made its way around the world (rather demonstrating Vint Cerf’s point about the Internet’s role in exposing violence) and the arrest sparked mass public dissent, building on tensions that had been growing over
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CHAPTER 14 Making a road where there isn’t one Are we nearly there yet? During my visit to Washington, DC, to meet Google’s Vint Cerf, I used my one evening in the city to tour its monuments and historical buildings. I stood outside the White House and asked a fellow
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that we cannot yet comprehend. He popped up in my conversations with Eric Drexler (mastering nanotechnology is fundamental in shaping the future Ray foresees) and Vint Cerf at Google (Ray was one of the few futurists to accurately predict the rise of the Internet). Throughout my journey I’ve been reading his
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in what he calls ‘radical innovation.’ His website tells me he is ‘part scientist, part artist, and part strategist’ as well as a keen motorcyclist. Vint Cerf told me, ‘John is among the best thinkers in the United States and probably in the world. He’s just a brilliant, modest, very, very
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, sewers, waterways, ports. These were new technologies. Today we don’t think of the road or the sewer as a technology. But they are: as Vint Cerf told me, ‘If you grow up with a technology, it’s not technology. It’s just there.’ In 2009, John Seely Brown told a crowd
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us to rediscover it. After all, what could be more human than the Legion of Extraordinary Dancers, who had come up in my conversation with Vint Cerf – a dance troupe built from kids innovating on each other’s moves (continually posted on YouTube) and who appeared at the 2010 TED conference in
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rolled off that ‘big printer’ in New Bedford) has been charging the mobile phone I am now using to access the Internet (co-fathered by Vint Cerf, whom I met in Washington, D.C). Thinking back to my conversation with Ray Kurzweil about exponentials, I realise that all of this technology would
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twentieth century. Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and The Nineteenth Century’s Online Pioneers Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1998 Vint Cerf called this ‘a great book’ – and he’s right. A history of the electric telegraph that puts our increasing connectedness into perspective. EARTH Chris Goodall
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Galactic Suite, Barcelona for gin and tonics and the three questions that matter (apologies that more of our chat didn’t make the final cut). Vint Cerf must be thanked first and foremost for co-fathering the Internet (I couldn’t have written this book without it), but also for being an
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beings go, Juan is one of my favourites. His book As The Future Catches You is highly recommended. John Seely Brown (on the recommendation of Vint Cerf) saw me at impossibly short notice. He talked about cultivating serendipity and this meeting, for me, was an example of it. His insights helped me
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me to have my genetic profile processed by 23andMe. Rachel Whetstone, Anthony House and Carla LaFever (all of Google) formed a procession that led to Vint Cerf, and Nikki Fenwick and Aya Okuma helped me hook up with Dan Reicher. I’ve made a brace of new friends on my travels (and
The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal
by M. Mitchell Waldrop · 14 Apr 2001
, who seemed to have a knack for be- coming the ringleader of any group he was in; his old high school buddy from Van Nuys, Vint Cerf; Jon Postel, who would eventually take over the editorship of the RFC (and would continue in that role until his death in 1998); and a
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an effort to make their Sigma 7 computer do what ARPA was paying them to do, which was gather real-time data on network performance, Vint Cerf and several others were graft- ing a series of hurried modifications into their homegrown time-sharing system, designated SEX, the Sigma Experimental system (official handbook
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connected anything at all to the network, Metcalfe found himself becoming an "Arpanet facilitator." "That was a group that included me, Jon Postel, Steve Crocker, Vint Cerf, and a bunch of others," he says. "Our job was wandering around helping people get on the Arpanet. Now, this was the Vietnam era, so
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out at UCLA for weeks at a time. "He wanted to force the network into certain modes in which he predicted it would fail," says Vint Cerf, who first met Kahn during these visits. "Other peo- ple at BBN didn't believe it would fail this way. So he came out to
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. But having given them that support, he now expected them to deliver. "Steve was sort of the putative head of the Network Working Group," says Vint Cerf. "So he would report progress to Larry, and if Larry was unhappy with something, he would holler at Steve. Steve would take the heat, then
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going to the turtle," Kleinrock recalls, laughing. "Someone had messed up a connection. So there was Jon's output, jumping around on the floor!" Meanwhile, Vint Cerf was watching the attendees who were seeing all this for the first time. "I thought there were three kinds of reactions," he says. "The first
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in flexible automation in manufacturing." That sounded good to Kahn; he left BBN for ARPA almost immediately after wrapping up the ICCC demonstration. His buddy Vint Cerf, meanwhile, was on much the same schedule: as soon as the demonstration was over, he left UCLA to take a faculty position at Stanford. And
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("without enthusiasm," he adds). But then he had quickly gotten caught up in another dis- traction: right down the hill, on the campus at Stanford, Vint Cerf was organizing a series of networking seminars that Metcalfe did not want to miss. The impetus had come from Bob Kahn at ARPA, who wanted
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since there was no way he could do that himself in his spare time, he decided to seek the help of his old Arpanet buddy Vint Cerf, who had just joined the computer-science faculty at Stanford. Kahn's pitch was very casual, Cerf remembers, with no mention of an ARPA contract
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more time would pass before the Inter- net truly began to take on a life of its own. But it was definitely a beginning. Unfortunately, Vint Cerf's internetworking seminars were not such a happy memory for one participant: Bob Metcalfe soon had to quit in utter frustration. LIVING IN THE FUTURE
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director of the IPT Office, and networking chief Bob Kahn had moved up in 1976 to be- come Russell's deputy. Kahn had then brought Vint Cerf in from Stanford to take his place, and gone to work doing what he could to restore IPTO's lost glory. Such were the benefits
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of the twenty-first century. Better still, Kahn realized, the technical wherewithal for such an information infrastructure was actually in fairly good shape, now that Vint Cerf was at ARPA and pursuing his "single-minded goal" of making the TCP lIP protocol suite as robust and as bulletproof as possible. Indeed, the
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Arpanet itself had switched over to TCP lIP on January 1, 1983-an event that many would call the actual birth of the Internet. Moreover, Vint Cerf had arranged to have the protocols implemented in as many operating systems as possible, Unix most definitely included. But by 1985 the department had also
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activities. But out of necessity, we forced the regionals to become general-purpose network providers." Or as they would soon be called, Internet Service Providers. Vint Cerf, for one, is still lost in admiration for this little gambit. "Brilliant," he calls it. "The creation of those regional nets and the requirement that
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and then alerting me to several of Lick's papers that I had missed. · to Tim Anderson, Gordon Bell, Leo Beranek, Marjory Blumenthal, David Burmaster, Vint Cerf, Paul Ceruzzi, Wes Clark, Fernando Corbato, Steve Crocker, Mike Dertouzos, Jerry Elkind, Doug Engelbart, Bill English, Bob Fano, Ed Feigenbaum, Jack Goldman, Charlie Herzfeld, Bob
The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution
by Walter Isaacson · 6 Oct 2014 · 720pp · 197,129 words
create the Alto at Xerox PARC. Ethernet developed by Bob Metcalfe at Xerox PARC. Community Memory shared terminal set up at Leopold’s Records, Berkeley. Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn complete TCP/IP protocols for the Internet. 1974 Intel 8080 comes out. 1975 Altair personal computer from MITS appears. Paul Allen and
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the instructions in the headers. “It’s like breaking a long letter into dozens of postcards, each numbered and addressed to the same place,” explained Vint Cerf, one of the Internet’s pioneers. “Each may take different routes to get to the destination, and then they’re reassembled.”54 As Scantlebury explained
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communications systems, nations would not feel the need to adopt a hair-trigger posture. Donald Davies (1924–2000). Paul Baran (1926–2011). Leonard Kleinrock (1934– ). Vint Cerf (1943– ) and Bob Kahn (1938– ). Baran came up with two key ideas, which he began publishing in 1960. His first was that the network should
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project. Even after the ARPANET morphed into the Internet in the early 1980s, it would continue to serve both a military and a civilian purpose. Vint Cerf, a gentle and reflective thinker who helped create the Internet, recalled, “I wanted to demonstrate that our technology could survive a nuclear attack.” So in
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of rapport with each other,” recalled Stephen Crocker, a graduate student on the UCLA team who had driven up with his best friend and colleague, Vint Cerf. So they decided to meet regularly, rotating among their sites. The polite and deferential Crocker, with his big face and bigger smile, had just the
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as it has,” Crocker said later.99 Even more broadly, it became the standard for collaboration in the digital age. Thirty years after RFC 1, Vint Cerf wrote a philosophical RFC called “The Great Conversation” that began, “A long time ago, in a network far, far away . . .” After describing the informal way
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colleagues began calling an “internetwork.” After a while, that word got shortened a bit, to “internet.” To be his partner in this endeavor, Kahn tapped Vint Cerf, who had been Steve Crocker’s sidekick on the group writing Requests for Comments and figuring out the protocols of the ARPANET. Cerf was raised
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initiative in creating the Internet.”41 It was inelegantly phrased, as answers on cable news shows often are, but he never used the word invented. Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, two of the people who did in fact invent the Internet’s protocols, spoke up on Gore’s behalf. “No one in
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Licklider, crisp decision-making engineers such as Larry Roberts, politically adroit people handlers such as Bob Taylor, and collaborative oarsmen such as Steve Crocker and Vint Cerf. Another key to fielding a great team is pairing visionaries, who can generate ideas, with operating managers, who can execute them. Visions without execution are
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, including Bob Albrecht, Al Alcorn, Marc Andreessen, Tim Berners-Lee, Stewart Brand, Dan Bricklin, Larry Brilliant, John Seeley Brown, Nolan Bushnell, Jean Case, Steve Case, Vint Cerf, Wes Clark, Steve Crocker, Lee Felsenstein, Bob Frankston, Bob Kahn, Alan Kay, Bill Gates, Al Gore, Andy Grove, Justin Hall, Bill Joy, Jim Kimsey, Leonard
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by Paul McJones, Oct. 2008, Computer History Museum; Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, 1054; Segaller, Nerds, 62. 54. Author’s interview with Vint Cerf. 55. Paul Baran, “On Distributed Computer Networks,” IEEE Transactions on Communications Systems, Mar. 1964. This section on Baran draws on John Naughton, A Brief History
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. Author’s interview with Steve Crocker. 87. Author’s interview with Leonard Kleinrock. 88. Author’s interview with Robert Taylor. 89. Author’s interview with Vint Cerf; Radia Joy Perlman, “Network Layer Protocols with Byzantine Robustness,” PhD dissertation, MIT, 1988, http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/14403. 90. Abbate, Inventing the
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Late, 1528. 95. The tale of Steve Crocker’s RFCs has been told in many variations. This account comes from my interviews with Steve Crocker, Vint Cerf, Leonard Kleinrock; Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, 2192 and passim; Abbate, Inventing the Internet, 1330 and passim; Stephen Crocker oral history, conducted
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.” 98. Stephen Crocker, “Host Software,” RFC 1, Apr. 7, 1969, http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1. 99. Crocker, “How the Internet Got Its Rules.” 100. Vint Cerf, “The Great Conversation,” RFC 2555, Apr. 7, 1999, http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2555.txt. 101. “The IMP Log: October 1969 to April 1970
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, http://internethistory.ucla.edu/the-imp-log-october-1969-to-april-1970/; Segaller, Nerds, 92; Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, 2336. 102. Vint Cerf oral history, conducted by Daniel Morrow, Nov. 21, 2001, Computerworld Honors Program; Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, 2070 and passim; Abbate, Inventing
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history, Computerworld. 104. Robert Kahn oral history, conducted by Michael Geselowitz, Feb. 17, 2004, IEEE History Center. 105. Vint Cerf oral history, conducted by Judy O’Neill, Apr. 24, 1990, Charles Babbage Institute; Vint Cerf, “How the Internet Came to Be,” Nov. 1993, http://www.netvalley.com/archives/mirrors/cerf-how-inet.html. 106
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Kahn oral history, conducted by David Allison, Apr. 20, 1995, Computerworld Honors Program. 107. “The Poems,” RFC 1121, Sept. 1989. 108. Author’s interview with Vint Cerf. 109. Hafner and Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, 1163. 110. David D. Clark, “A Cloudy Crystal Ball,” MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, July 1992
This Is for Everyone: The Captivating Memoir From the Inventor of the World Wide Web
by Tim Berners-Lee · 8 Sep 2025 · 347pp · 100,038 words
-designed protocol was something called TCP/IP (it combines the Transmission Control Protocol with the Internet Protocol). It was developed by two American network engineers, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, both of whom I would later have the pleasure of meeting. (Cerf and Kahn are sometimes called the ‘fathers’ of the internet
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one internet, rather than American and European versions which couldn’t talk to one another – there were enough language problems already. He even brought in Vint Cerf to give a talk on the advantages of the IP system. He eventually won, and by 1988, everyone at CERN had an internet-facing email
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claim as much influence on the subsequent development of the internet as Al Gore. My words echo those of the true inventors of the internet, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn: ‘No one in public life has been more intellectually engaged in helping to create the climate for a thriving Internet than the
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for the web, so this decision didn’t impact me – and it didn’t matter. For the web to succeed, it had to be free. Vint Cerf had similarly licensed his TCP/IP protocol for eternal, free public domain use, with no restrictions. Cerf, whom I greatly admired, hailed from the mainframe
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all internet traffic. By the end of the year that had risen to 2.5 per cent. No other protocol had ever grown so quickly. Vint Cerf, the co-inventor of the original internet protocol layer, became aware of the web protocol around this time. Cerf’s previous efforts to put multimedia
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. Our work benefited significantly from his expertise. • The rapid global adoption of smartphones led to an explosion in the number of people and devices online. Vint Cerf and the IETF had to expand the IP addressing system by several orders of magnitude just to accommodate all these new devices. It had taken
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imagine, it was a very geeky affair – not quite the Oscars, although everybody in computer science was there. Many past Turing Award-winners attended, including Vint Cerf, who was turning seventy-four that day. We opened the festivities by singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to him. After I was presented with the award, I
Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future
by Ben Tarnoff · 13 Jun 2022 · 234pp · 67,589 words
researchers who created the protocol in the 1970s envisioned a network with mobile nodes. For the Pentagon to get the most out of its computers, Vint Cerf later said, “the computers have to be where the people are.” The universal language of the internet would put the computers where the people were
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the time, making the load plan was a manual job. “Guys would run around with little stubby pencils and paper trying to figure it out,” Vint Cerf later recalled. A group of DARPA contractors came up with an alternative. They put together a demonstration at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, home to the
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Truck, and the Internet’s First Communion,” Wired, August 13, 2012; Cade Metz, “How a Bread Truck Invented the Internet,” The Register, November 12, 2007; Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, “30th Anniversary of Internetting with TCP/IP,” filmed November 7, 2007, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, YouTube; Barbara
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Denny, Paal Spilling, and Virginia Strazisar Travers, “Birth of the Internet,” filmed November 7, 2007, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, YouTube; Vint Cerf et al., “Internet Milestone—30th Anniversary 3-Network Transmission,” filmed November 7, 2007, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, https://youtu.be
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win wars … My discussion of the DARPA internetworking project in this section draws from Cerf, interview by O’Neill; Nielson, interview by author; Ryan Singel, “Vint Cerf: We Knew What We Were Unleashing on the World,” Wired, April 23, 2012; Cerf and Kahn, “30th Anniversary of Internetting with TCP/IP,” https://youtu
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and Kahn, “30th Anniversary of Internetting with TCP/IP,” YouTube, starts around 13:54. 10, In response, the architects of the internet … The blueprint was Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn, “A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication,” IEEE Transactions on Communications 22, no. 5 (May 1974): 637–48. “A simple but …”: Ibid., 647
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off the internet, see Newman, Net Loss, 62–69. One example of industry monetization during the NSF-era internet is MCI Mail, which internet pioneer Vint Cerf helped develop. Cerf persuaded the NSF to allow MCI Mail to connect with the internet in 1988; CompuServe and Sprint would obtain permission as well
Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions
by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths · 4 Apr 2016 · 523pp · 143,139 words
up of a path, or it can refer to an association between two or more entities, with or without regard to any path between them. —VINT CERF AND BOB KAHN Only connect. —E. M. FORSTER The long-distance telegraph began with a portent—Samuel F. B. Morse, standing in the chambers of
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the Internet) is what’s known as Transmission Control Protocol, or TCP. It was born from a 1973 talk and a 1974 paper by Vinton “Vint” Cerf and Robert “Bob” Kahn, who laid out a proposal for the language of—as they imagined calling it—an “internetwork.” TCP initially used telephone lines
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any protocol, human or machine, is, quite simply: how do you know your messages are getting through? Acknowledgment No transmission can be 100 percent reliable. —VINT CERF AND BOB KAHN “WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT” wasn’t just the first long-distance telegraph message sent in the United States. It was also the
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? Am I slow? The issues faced by the Byzantine generals, as he reminds us, “are not design complexities, they are impossibility results.” Earlier networking research, Vint Cerf notes, had been founded “on the assumption that you could build a reliable underlying net.” On the other hand, “the Internet was based on the
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the very infrastructure of the Internet itself. Gettys sat down to lunches with key players at Comcast, Verizon, Cisco, and Google, including Van Jacobson and Vint Cerf, and slowly started to piece the puzzle together. The problem was everywhere. And the problem was bufferbloat. A buffer is essentially a queue whose function
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of a software engineer, March 25, 2015, http://bravenewgeek.com/you-cannot-have-exactly-once-delivery/. “end-to-end retransmissions to recover”: Vint Cerf, interviewed by Charles Severance, “Computing Conversations: Vint Cerf on the History of Packets,” 2012. “you just say, ‘Say that again’”: Ibid. “The world’s most difficult word to translate”: Oliver
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thereof. Thanks to Henry Young for a sharp portrait. Thanks to those who read drafts and offered invaluable feedback along the way: to Ben Blum, Vint Cerf, Elizabeth Christian, Randy Christian, Peter Denning, Peter Eckersley, Chrix Finne, Rick Fletcher, Adam Goldstein, Alison Gopnik, Sarah Greenleaf, Graff Haley, Greg Jensen, Charles Kemp, Raphael
The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires
by Tim Wu · 2 Nov 2010 · 418pp · 128,965 words
with early radio is instructive. When Hoover headed the agency, virtually anyone was welcome to run a primitive station, an environment that the Internet pioneeer Vint Cerf would later term “permissionless innovation.” To run a television station, however, one had to apply to the FCC for an experimental license, subject to strict
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need a universal language. One would need an Esperanto for computers. In 1973, this was the problem facing two young computer science graduate students named Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn. One memorable afternoon in 2008 in a small Google conference room equipped with a whiteboard, I asked
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Vint Cerf what exactly was the problem he had been trying to solve when he designed the Internet protocol.4 The answer surprised me. As Cerf explained
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everybody else. Coming of age concurrently with an ideological backlash against centralized planning and authority, the Internet became a creature of its times. In 1982 Vint Cerf and his colleagues issued a rare command, drawing on the limited power they did have over their creation. “If you don’t implement TCP/IP
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online world. This anger, though understandable and predictable, as with any failed union, is ultimately misdirected. It rightly belongs with J.C.R. Licklider and Vint Cerf. Without specifically intending to, the founders of the Internet had foreordained by the radicalism of their conception that Levin and Case’s great image of
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about its business model at every turn, had by the new millennium become the incarnation of the Internet gospel of openness. It had even hired Vint Cerf, one of the network’s greatest visionaries, giving him the title “Chief Internet Evangelist.”2 Their corporate mottoes, “Think Different” and “Do No Evil,” while
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. Sterling, Phyllis Bernt, and Martin B. H. Weiss, Shaping American Telecommunications: A History of Technology, Policy, and Economics (New York: Routledge, 2006). To read how Vint Cerf, Robert Kahn, and Robert Metcalf interacted with AT&T, see their individual entries in Laura Lambert et al., The Internet: A Historical Encyclopedia, vol. 2
Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex
by Yasha Levine · 6 Feb 2018 · 474pp · 130,575 words
if still somewhat experimental, the ARPANET was the definition of an operational military network.60 Military Internet In the summer of 1973, Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf locked themselves in a conference room at the upscale Hyatt Cabana El Camino Real just a mile south of Stanford. The Cabana was the most
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. In some cases, the outcome of the applications that we used were so good that they became part of the normal everyday operation.” Of course, Vint Cerf wasn’t the only one working out practical military applications for the ARPANET. Congressional reports and internal ARPA documents from the 1970s are full of
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Martin.109 It beefed up its lobbying muscle and assembled a team of Democratic and Republican operatives. Google even grabbed ARPA’s old show pony: Vint Cerf, who, as Google’s vice president and chief Internet evangelist, served as a symbolic bridge between Google and the military. While Google’s public relations
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, the NSA worked with Vinton Cerf on a classified project to design a “fully secured internet system” based on the ARPANET. Oral History of Vinton (Vint) Cerf, Interviewed by Donald Nielson (Mountain View, CA: Computer History Museum, November 7, 2007), 20, http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2012/04/102658186-05
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