Just the nicest guy you could imagine. He took the note-takers job during our breakouts, had beers with us after the session, and asked really good questions and never asserted anything the whole time.
What a legend.
However I never forget my surprise, Idly flicking through TV one evening and coming across Earth Final Conflict - and there was Vint in a fairly substantial role
It’s like two lifetimes in tech years. I remember that summer Google Earth was launched, we were a year removed from the Gmail launch, and I worked on shipping the first Summer of Code.
Maybe having multiple streams within a single connection, like QUIC does, would have been a better choice. Also being able to demarcate message boundaries within the protocol itself, perhaps, instead of it being a simple byte stream.
1. It would have 128-bit addresses. 2. It would have end-to-end encryption (or was it authentication, I forget).
IPv6 was supposed to fix both of these, with IPsec mandatory, but the latter demand sort of faded out into obscurity. We ended up basically solving encryption by pushing everything into TLS anyway, which I guess solved much of the same problems although at a very different layer.
I always wonder if the internet is thesurvivor of the networking cambrian explosion, with a slight roll of the dice making another candidate the winner.
In a sense, he did. Take a look at RFC 4838.
No matter what you think of Google
I’m concerned about the power that Google and other Big Tech companies have, but from a technical point of view Google has a lot of impressive technologies, and from a workplace standpoint, it seemed idyllic back in the early 2010s, though I’ve heard the work culture has changed in the past decade, and I may have rose-colored glasses from only being an intern there, never a full-timer.
There are lots of brilliant people at Google who do no evil.
The fact that the company makes evil decisions about the direction of the web, privacy, and performs blatantly monopolistic actions does not outweigh the good things people at Google have done. At least not yet.
You can hate the company but love the brilliant work the engineers have done. The same can be said of lots of companies: Apple, Anthropic, ...
Meta, on the other hand, I'm not so sure about. It's less of an overt monopoly, but some of its actions are heinously amoral.
If you're eliminating, meta Google is the same and no better than Meta. You just don't see it as wide as Meta.
Any idea, innovation can take two routes but when you know you're working for the latter, you're not a good engineer, You're just an engineer.
It's as if someone was to poison a lake and then donate money to a charity. Does that make them a good person again?
He worked for MCI/Worldcomm, before Google. Bernie Ebbers went to jail, for that.
Ahh… the good ol’ days, when we actually jailed scumbag billionaires, instead of voting massive pay bumps…
https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA003070...
What's that for?
The video probably shows a wide smile whilst saying it.
— Vint Cerf, Tracking the Internet into the 21st Century <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hf0rjtnwC9A>
Al Gore Jr.'s father, the Sr., was instrumental in enacting the US Interstate Highway system:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Gore_Sr.#U.S._Senate
Which transformed the economy for physical goods. Jr saw parallels with the transportation of information, and coined a term (in 1978!) about it:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_superhighway
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_and_information_techno...
Absolutely correct — and that's not sarcasm or irony. (Gore never claimed to have "invented the Internet"; that was a calumny spread by Republicans.)
So, eleven.
The Dream Machine is a history book by M. Mitchell Waldrop that tells the story of JCR Licklider.
An anecdote: I wrote a program (in Sigma-7 assembler I think) to play Jotto--a bit like Mastermind but with 5 letter words. Vint loved to poke around in people's directories to see what they were up to and found my program. He played it a few times, and then collared me to ask me a couple of questions: 1) It seemed to know some of the words he entered but not all -- what was up with that? 2) What sort of AI algorithm was I using for the program to make guesses? (It usually beat the human player.)
Answers: 1) I didn't have a digitized dictionary (it was 1969!) so I hand-entered the five letter words from a pocket dictionary but got tired halfway through so it only knew words starting with a-l. 2) The program would eliminate any words that didn't fit the responses to its guesses so far and then pick a remaining word at random.
Upon hearing my answers Vint walked away in disgust! But years later he gave me a recommendation when I interviewed with Google (it didn't work out for other reasons).
I also shared a cubicle wall with another Van Nuys High alumni, Jon Postel, aka "God of the Internet". Sartorially, Jon was the complete opposite of Vint--long scraggly beard, blue jeans, forever barefoot--but those weren't the things that mattered. Man, those were the days.
https://web.archive.org/web/20131104212006/http://deafness.a...
> He is routinely referred to as "the father of the internet,"
There is no one else who is referred to that way. If you google "father of the Internet", Vint pops up.
https://www.inmesol.com/blog/fathers-internet/
> Vinton Cerf (Connecticut, 1943) Considered to be the founding father of the Internet.
BTW if I google father of the internet I get Cerf and Kahn or it says "a father"
And none of this is really relevant because it's TFA that should determine HN titles. But for better or worse the mod has made his decision, so this is moot -- I won't comment on it further.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Where-Wizards-Stay-Up-Late/dp/06848...
(Well actually I'm listening to it not reading, maybe that's why I can't keep track of the protagonists!)
> Vinton G. Cerf, a senior vice president at MCI Worldcom and the person most often called "the father of the Internet" for his part in designing the network's common computer language, said in an e-mail interview yesterday, "I think it is very fair to say that the Internet would not be where it is in the United States without the strong support given to it and related research areas by the vice president in his current role and in his earlier role as senator."
As another commenter has pointed out, Vint Cerf himself credits Gore as playing a significant role in enabling the Internet’s emergence. He didn’t claim to have “invented” it.
Gore's actual words were widely reaffirmed by notable Internet pioneers, such as Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, who stated, "No one in public life has been more intellectually engaged in helping to create the climate for a thriving Internet than the Vice President."
Emphasis on actual words, with an obligatory side dish of context.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_and_information_techno...
Can we post jokes?? Everyone knows Al Gore didn't sit around in an SV garage inventing the internet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_and_information_techno...
The same goes for you. Calling out bullshit and disinformation benefits the whole community,unlike nonsensical remarks. So if you don't appreciate efforts to counter nonsense by bringing facts to the discussion, just sit this one out.
I wonder what he feeling about it
JE's LIST OF SCIENTIST's
Vinton Cerf
Dennis S. Charney
James Fallon
Elaine Fuchs
Neil Gershenfeld
John Holdren-No
Petr Janata
Seth Lloyd- Yes
Maja Mataric
Lyman Page
David Spergel
Suzanne Staggs
Edward 0. Wilson- No
Adam Wilson
Kinda sad state of journalism if techcrunch writes article and doesn't do the basic "boomer VIP check" against the Epstein files.
Cerf, 83, and collaborator Robert Kahn are credited as being the architects of the networking protocols that became the internet we know today.
Not everyone "in the files" is in the files. For instance, Rebecca Watson is "in the Epstein Files" because Lawrence Kraus and Richard Dawkins wrote to Epstein to complain about her.
That was almost nine years ago, and I actually increased my development work, with the caveat that no one pays me to do it, anymore.
Probably one of the best things that ever happened to me, but I didn’t think so, at the time.
I wish him luck.
Had I coinvented TCP/IP, I’d gladly take a bullshit, cushy paying job in my latter half of my career as a ‘reward’
I personally witnessed Vint give valuable advice to managers like me, often in difficult cases. It sounds banal but often in a large corp you know what you need to do, but will have a lot of - justified or not - doubt about whether you can get through the bureaucratic molasses and the political interests of your higher ups. Vint's backing enabled a lot of people to do what's right.
One of my colleagues has printed and framed a reply from such a thread, where he offered an opinion in support of another manger. Vint replied "This is good advice. V.".
I hope he enjoys retirement, well deserved