I met Vint at the Kech Institute for Space Studies. He arrived to help us look at in-space data centers for planetary science throughout the solar system. He was a big proponent of delay-tolerant networking and other useful networking stacks, so he was the "rep" for that layer of problems.
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.
true - my first reaction was this seems like a weird milestone, as people like Vint Cerf don't really retire and stop, just change how & where they contribute. This seems like a nothing story pushed by TC and Google PR, more than a real event.
For all the naysayers in this thread, I gotta say you’re wrong. Vint is a class act. Humble, helpful, and optimistic. Not to mention one of the most impactful computer scientists of our generation.
I have to judge people by their choices, not their personality: Vint has spent twenty years in a promotional/evangelizing job for one of the most toxic and damaging companies of our time in exchange for what I can only assume is a monumental amount of money. Good people don't do that.
Has he really evangelized the evil practices that you are so concerned about? Or would you lump in anyone working at Google to not live up to your expectations?
I would say there's a huge difference between taking a paycheck from Google because you need it to feed your family, and specifically carving out a role in promoting Google's agenda for two decades. Even in this puff piece about him, he is quoted promoting the agentic era of the Internet. (In other news, I recently read about a city that tried to hide that a third of it's water supply was getting used by a Google datacenter. And what happened to all those carbon neutral pledges...)
There's a big difference between working on a tobacco farm and being the spokesperson for Big Tobacco. He is the latter. I suspect history will someday remember him more for this than his work on TCP/IP.
I interviewed him a few times, when I was a tech journalist in the 90s - a very impressive man.
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
hah. I was an intern at Google in 2005 when he was hired and remember the wave of reverence that went through Mountain View. Salute to a legend!
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.
I don't want to name him as he's decently well known, but I'm pretty sure my mentor monitored Vint's interview to make sure no one accidentally rejected him for a coding error or something.
I don't know if he had to do technical interviews (I'd imagine not) but what he described was Eric Schmidt approaching him and asking him to leave MCI to work at Google. They asked him what his title should be and he (I think he) jokingly suggested Internet Pope. They eventually settled on Chief Internet Evangelist.
Google hired Guido van Rossum around the same time. I worked down the hall from Rob Pike, they had already hired Peter Weinberger (the w from `awk`), and I shared a 4-person office with Gren Stein, who was then director of the Apache Software Foundation.
I worked on GFiber in the mid 2010s. We were having a debate about IPv6 support, which many people wanted to not do. I wrote a far-too-long essay on why it was important (at the time) and Vint picked it up to yell at the leadership team to get it prioritized. It was truly an "only at Google" experience to have someone who essentially invented the Internet reading your posts and acting on them.
(I guess a decade later, was IPv6 important? Still not sure about that one. But it seemed important at the time.)
Anyone know what he actually did at Google? Was it an active role, did he publish anything interesting? Or was it more of an Institute for Advanced Study kind of position?
He was hired to go to meetings and state “I’m vint cerf, I work at Google” then blab for 2 mins and introduce the actual speaker for a meeting/conference.
maybe this is a good thing though, where someone with a huge, legitimate contribution and legacy gets to cash in on their status, vs. the typical influencer.
He worked on a few X projects and had some free reign to push next gen ideas. Delay tolerant networking is the one I interacted with the most, as well as Google Loon, if you recall that.
He was involved in the design, planning, and future-proofing one of the major redesigns of Google's data center fabric. Google, AFAIK still uses a derivative of the fabric today.
I wonder if he would have designed TCP/IP differently if he'd had the chance to have a second go of it.
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.
he's answered this question a few times. It's basically "how was I supposed to have any idea what the implications were?" He said something like "16 bit, 32 bit, 48 bit addressing, it felt all equally improbable. Why would there ever be 65,000 computers on this network?"
The computers of today are vastly more capable than the computers of the day when he came up with TCP/IP so if he were to have a second chance, knowing what he knows now, we'd have to calibrate it against the fact that computers in the 1970s simply weren't as capable as the beasts we have today.
I was at a talk where he brought up exactly this (I also once did a talk alongside him, but that's a different story). He said there would be two changes:
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.
Doing this brings you close to OSI, which famously failed by being overcomplicated. The current design was implementable by zillions of cheap humans running cheap hardware.
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.
> The current design was implementable by zillions of cheap humans running cheap hardware.
Yes and no. The current internet arguably does not work without a browser and a TLS stack anyway, neither of which is easily implementable (e.g. number of practically usable rendering engines is in the single digits). I mean, I can piece together an IP packet, too, but there's not that many usable services reachable that way.
As someone who was there at the time, OSI certainly didn't fail by being "overcomplicated". It failed because a) they charged money to read the standards documents and b) TCP/IP already had so much deployment momentum that nothing was going to supplant it (we see proof of this in the fact that IPv6 also didn't achieve that). Edit: also c) there was no requirement (unlike RFCs) to have an interoperable reference implementation available. So the implementations that were created mostly didn't interoperate.
> In your opinion, do you think Internet Protocol Version 8 (IPv8) [1] stands a chance to fix the mistakes of IPv6 after more than 20 years now?
IPv8 solves precisely zero of the problems that is causing a 'slow' roll out of IPv6 / replacement of IPv4:
"""
So it's a matter of mathematical and physical fact that to expand the address size, you must change the protocol, and that means two things immediately:
You have to change the version number.
You have to add new code to handle the new version.
Furthermore, you don't want to split the Internet in two, so you must design a method of interworking between the old version and the new version. Annoyingly, you need to do that in a way that can be done completely in machines that know about the new version, because other machines don't know anything at all about the new version, by definition. So,
You need a coexistence technique so that updated systems, with the new protocol, can connect to old systems that know nothing of the new protocol.
Two minutes of thought show that this third requirement has only two solutions:
(3A) Dual stack, in which the new machines speak both the old (IPv4) and new (IPng) protocol.
(3B) Translation, in which something translates addresses between the old and new protocols.
[…]
Incidentally, "IPv8" proponents often ask why IPv6 didn't simply stick some extra bits on the front of IPv4 addresses, instead of inventing a whole new format. Actually, we tried that: the "IPv4-Compatible IPv6 address" format was defined in [RFC3513] but deprecated by [RFC4291] because it turned out to be of no practical use for coexistence or transition. The related "IPv4-Mapped IPv6 address" format is still valid and has a role in the POSIX socket API. Mappings of this kind also figured in the moderately successful coexistence technologies known as 6to4 [RFC3056, RFC3068] and Teredo [RFC4380], which have now been overtaken by events.
I'm always fascinated by how many people think IPv6 adoption would have gone lightning-fast if we just used This One Weird Trick, where said trick has actually been tried and didn't help. They usually refuse to back down even after you tell them so.
This IPv8 document is not a serious proposal. The entire family of documents was published by a single person without collaboration from anyone else at IETF, and there has not been any work to integrate feedback from other IERF contributors (last I was aware of).
Anyone can publish an IETF draft document, it doesn't mean it's a serious proposal under consideration or will ever actually be implemented.
> Doing this brings you close to OSI, which famously failed by being overcomplicated.
We're slowly reinventing OSI, one step at a time: OSI had multiple sessions per transport connection (QUIC), 20 byte addresses (IPv6) and a directory system with public-key infrastructure (DANE, vCard, SSHFP, etc).
> 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.
The "solving" of encryption with TLS should not be celebrated.
Everything needs to go over TLS/HTTP-443 because of middleware boxes basically blocking everything else by default in many cases, and so application/protocol designs have to shoehorn / kludge everything into a round hole even if it's a square peg.
Certainly I'd want everything to have encryption at the higher layers (OSI 5-7), but having opportunistic encryption at IP (OSI 3) would also be great because snoopers could tell that two nodes are communicating but not how / what: RTSP? Torrent? Mindcraft? PvP2 game? If every node could (say) do an IKEv2 negotiation with every other node have IP-level traffic wrapped in IPsec that would help with traffic analysis.
It would depend on whether the computers back then could handle that (along with all the crypto algorithms in their infancy) when A:\ and B:\ weren't even a thing.
When I was in elementary school in the 90s I was doing a project about this new (to me) thing called “the internet.” My mom helped me cold email Vint and he sent me a very nice reply. Never forgot that.
I still remember back in 2005 when I just joined a company, a coworker was quipping Google is not a real elite company, because it doesn't even have a Turing Award winner. I showed him the news that Vint Cerf joined Google recently.
I wonder if the transformer inventors will ever get a Turing (honestly proving to be one of the most transformative - no pun intended - technologies of the millennium so far). I know pretty much all of them left Google but they'd still be counted as alumni.
Yeah, some work from Google has had an outsize impact on the entire industry. Won't be surprising if they eventually get a nod from the Turing Award. Including the main authors of the Transformer work for driving the LLM revolution, and Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat for driving the big data movement.
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.
And this folks is exactly the reason we need to remember that there are real costs to demanding transparency. There's a reason some things should have stayed redacted.
I may be biased since I interned at Google in 2013 and 2014, but Google in the 2000s and early 2010s felt downright magical as someone who wanted to pursue a career in systems software research. They made impressive technologies that still hold up today, like MapReduce, BigTable, and Spanner. They hired many legends of computer science and software engineering, such as Rob Pike and Jeff Dean.
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.
> who wanted to pursue a career in systems software research
I interacted with many professors in OS research and other adjacent systems fields when touring grad schools and I heard or saw that some were extremely toxic or intense compared to other fields I saw. With OS at least, big tech companies seem to hold a lot of influence over research directions (eg. so much of it is specifically for AI datacenters, or for one company's AI datacenter problems), and I asked OS professors about this and got disheartened replies that there was nothing they could do because of the incentives in the field. I was quite disillusioned. I know that AI being a hot new topic makes leaves more stones unturned and might lead to more publishability, but it's still depressing.
I’m out of the loop these days in systems research since I largely focus on programming languages and AI these days (though I still love systems) and I treat research more as a side hobby rather than a full-fledged career. It’s disappointing to hear about toxic systems labs. There’s also the “funding-or-perish” and “publish-or-perish” pressures of academia. This is one of the reasons why I teach at a community college, where 8 months of the year I focus on teaching, leaving me 4 months of break per year where I could do research without having to worry about my tenure chances or about funding, though it would be nice to be able to pay some students to help with research projects, and it would also be nice to have the funds to buy expensive equipment such as GPUs with large amounts of RAM.
That seems like a great setup, and maybe something I'll think about after grad school (or maybe look into being a professor at LACs or less research oriented schools)! I'm already sort of nervous about doing the PhD because of the insane toxicity I've encountered and the pressure to do research in direct support of industry (which is probably exacerbated by NSF funding being impossible to get), but hopefully I'll find things to enjoy about it. The career prospects also seem tenuous, as a lot of outcomes seem to be "go through a brutal tenure process" or work for FAANG/adjacent (probably not even in research since places like MSR are difficult to get). But I would like the creative freedom a professorship might offer.
I worked on the ARPANET project under Steve Crocker at UCLA and met his bud Vint there (with his ever-present 3 piece suit, briefcase, and hearing aids) ... what a great guy.
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.
How amazing it must be to be called the 'father' of something that everyone uses... I'm envious. Could I ever create something like that? As a programmer, the dream is always to build something that others actually use properly.
My "When I met Vint" story is less exciting then some here. He attended the "Disability Support Group" at Google regularly. He made a point of just being there to listen and support others.
> There's always some nincompoop who brings that up. Al Gore deserves credit for what he did as a senator and vice president. He helped to pass legislation that enabled the NSFNET backbone to grow and to permit commercial traffic to flow on the government-sponsored backbones in the US. Had he not done that, it's pretty likely that the commercial sector would not have seen an opportunity to create a commercial internet that all of us can enjoy, so he does deserve some credit for what he's done.
Ooh, several of those as well! Sibling comment mentions Radia Perlman. She invented Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) which prevents loops in wiring from taking down networks. (Plug an Ethernet cable into the same switch it comes out of.) This has saved everyone's bacon countless times. Elizabeth Feinler managed hostnames before there was DNS and helped establish several of the top level domains (TLD)s we use today. There's Karen Spärck Jones without whom, search engines wouldn't be what they are today. Judy Estrin helped with TCP/IP, Sally Floyd worked on congestion control algorithms, without which, the Internet would have gotten all choked up and never gotten off the ground. Susan Estrada helped commercialize the Internet, with her work on internet exchanges (IX), and Jean Armour Polly gets credit for coining the phrase "surfing the Internet." but should be better known for pioneering public Internet access and for her work with families and kids getting online.
These women played a critical role in creating the Internet we have today.
The two that are most widely recognized are Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, for TCP/IP, but that's just the start of it. There's JCR Licklider, who first imagined a global network of computers. There's Leonard Kleinrock, first ARPANET nod and packet-switching theory. Larry Roberts, who led development of ARPANET. Paul Baran independently invented packet switching. Donald Davies coined the term "packet" and also developed packet switching. Louis Pouzin also worked on TCP/IP. Jon Postel managed the IP standards and address assignments for decades. Ray Tomlinson invented email and the @ sign. Of course, we can't forget Tim Berneres-Lee, to whom we credit the invention of the web (HTTP, HTML, URLS, the first web browser and server).
So, eleven.
The Dream Machine is a history book by M. Mitchell Waldrop that tells the story of JCR Licklider.
Ooh, hadn't heard of him. From Wikipedia, V. Bush is famous for, among other things, creating the NSF, the memex, an analog microfilm precusor to hypertext, and his essay "As We May Think" in 1945. Definitely influential in the creation of our world today!
I'm reading "where the wizards stay up late", and I was thinking the same thing. It's difficult to keep track of who is who but I'm pretty certain Cerf has appeared yet. I'm not that far through.
The title of your second link is "The Fathers of the Internet" and Robert Kahn as co-inventor of TCP/IP protocol is also considered a father of the internet.
BTW if I google father of the internet I get Cerf and Kahn or it says "a father"
I know what the title says, of course ... but the title is descriptive, not a label, and only Cerf is referred to as the father, as quoted. And yes of course Kahn co-invented TCP/IP but no one ever calls him father of the Internet. And I already said what happens if you google "father of the Internet" -- what I said is actually true.
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.
And man, for someone who calls something "nitpicking" to dig so deep into it ...
Vint took what could have been a prestige emeritus position at Google and turned it into a platform to champion accessibility and “Greyglers”. The man has more class than his suits.
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 was impressed with Vint Cerf when I saw him at a distance but once I had dealings with him about issues such as: the way the internet has become a pernicious influence, how the ACM is an industry group for computer science professors that doesn't support practitioners [1], the ACM's support for H-1B visas [2] I came to the conclusion that this quote is about him:
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on
his not understanding it.”
― Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked
[1] open access journals were a big step forward, but I was open access decades before
[2] i'll join a club which is neutral on the issue, but I can't accept the positive position, not because I feel it threatens me but because it pains me to see a brilliant data scientist being jerked around (bad enough that the HR lady leaves) and not being able to tell him "your skills are in demand and you can find another employer on the other side of the street" (this is NYC) And the argument that "startups" need it is bogus: Google can take a chance on a lottery, a key employee at a startup is key however.
I met Vint at the Kech Institute for Space Studies. He arrived to help us look at in-space data centers for planetary science throughout the solar system. He was a big proponent of delay-tolerant networking and other useful networking stacks, so he was the "rep" for that layer of problems.
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.
Apparently there's "more to come" and its not a complete retirement.
It’s hard to imagine that guy sitting still.
true - my first reaction was this seems like a weird milestone, as people like Vint Cerf don't really retire and stop, just change how & where they contribute. This seems like a nothing story pushed by TC and Google PR, more than a real event.
For a moment there I read "TC" and was like "the candidate"?!?!
Work induced brain damage... ;)
I mean, he's 83. No one's battery runs forever.
In his recent goodbye meeting he very much gave off a "I will die at my desk" kind of energy. Quite unstoppable.
For all the naysayers in this thread, I gotta say you’re wrong. Vint is a class act. Humble, helpful, and optimistic. Not to mention one of the most impactful computer scientists of our generation.
Exactly right. I have only had one long conversation with him, but he was friendly and very interesting.
I have to judge people by their choices, not their personality: Vint has spent twenty years in a promotional/evangelizing job for one of the most toxic and damaging companies of our time in exchange for what I can only assume is a monumental amount of money. Good people don't do that.
Has he really evangelized the evil practices that you are so concerned about? Or would you lump in anyone working at Google to not live up to your expectations?
I would say there's a huge difference between taking a paycheck from Google because you need it to feed your family, and specifically carving out a role in promoting Google's agenda for two decades. Even in this puff piece about him, he is quoted promoting the agentic era of the Internet. (In other news, I recently read about a city that tried to hide that a third of it's water supply was getting used by a Google datacenter. And what happened to all those carbon neutral pledges...)
There's a big difference between working on a tobacco farm and being the spokesperson for Big Tobacco. He is the latter. I suspect history will someday remember him more for this than his work on TCP/IP.
I interviewed him a few times, when I was a tech journalist in the 90s - a very impressive man.
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
hah. I was an intern at Google in 2005 when he was hired and remember the wave of reverence that went through Mountain View. Salute to a legend!
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.
wow, that was the golden age of Google.
I don't want to name him as he's decently well known, but I'm pretty sure my mentor monitored Vint's interview to make sure no one accidentally rejected him for a coding error or something.
They made him write code as part of an interview?
Never underestimate the power of hubris.
I don't know if he actually did.
Just know that my mentor was hand-holding the hiring process which basically prided itself on false negatives and still probably does.
I suspect the only thing at risk of being smeared by a more complete retelling of that story is Google’s interview process.
Vint had an interview?!! Who had the gall to suggest he needs to come in and be evaluated?
I don't remember the exact details after 20 yrs but I think EVERYONE got a coding loop no exceptions at the time by default.
And they were still in the era where's they'd just keep interviewing you until they "got enough signal" so people would be back 3 and 4 times.
I don't know if he had to do technical interviews (I'd imagine not) but what he described was Eric Schmidt approaching him and asking him to leave MCI to work at Google. They asked him what his title should be and he (I think he) jokingly suggested Internet Pope. They eventually settled on Chief Internet Evangelist.
They were really going after all the legends.
Google hired Guido van Rossum around the same time. I worked down the hall from Rob Pike, they had already hired Peter Weinberger (the w from `awk`), and I shared a 4-person office with Gren Stein, who was then director of the Apache Software Foundation.
I worked on GFiber in the mid 2010s. We were having a debate about IPv6 support, which many people wanted to not do. I wrote a far-too-long essay on why it was important (at the time) and Vint picked it up to yell at the leadership team to get it prioritized. It was truly an "only at Google" experience to have someone who essentially invented the Internet reading your posts and acting on them.
(I guess a decade later, was IPv6 important? Still not sure about that one. But it seemed important at the time.)
Wow Google Fiber what a blast from the past.
I eventually went full time at Google NYC in the early 2010s - I remember the internal uproar when Reader was sunsetted =)
Anyone know what he actually did at Google? Was it an active role, did he publish anything interesting? Or was it more of an Institute for Advanced Study kind of position?
He was hired to go to meetings and state “I’m vint cerf, I work at Google” then blab for 2 mins and introduce the actual speaker for a meeting/conference.
Similar ish to an influencer
I loved being able to say "vint cerf, my coworker, invented the internet"
maybe this is a good thing though, where someone with a huge, legitimate contribution and legacy gets to cash in on their status, vs. the typical influencer.
He worked on a few X projects and had some free reign to push next gen ideas. Delay tolerant networking is the one I interacted with the most, as well as Google Loon, if you recall that.
Was DTN used in Loon? They are a natural fit.
Launder Google’s reputation, I assume.
He was involved in the design, planning, and future-proofing one of the major redesigns of Google's data center fabric. Google, AFAIK still uses a derivative of the fabric today.
Disc: Former Googler, Cloud Networking.
I remember watching Lo and Behold by Werner Herzog and just going how dedicated the internet pioneers were working in their 70s and beyond.
Legends
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5275828/
Didn't know about this doc, thank you.
I wonder if he would have designed TCP/IP differently if he'd had the chance to have a second go of it.
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.
he's answered this question a few times. It's basically "how was I supposed to have any idea what the implications were?" He said something like "16 bit, 32 bit, 48 bit addressing, it felt all equally improbable. Why would there ever be 65,000 computers on this network?"
> "... Why would there ever be 65,000 computers on this network?"
This thinking can be seen in the allocation of network blocks. Mercedes Benz getting 53.0.0.0/8 is just a "we have more addresses than we ever need."
If somebody had imagined "yeah, let's give an address to each of our vehicles" they would have realized the space running out.
The computers of today are vastly more capable than the computers of the day when he came up with TCP/IP so if he were to have a second chance, knowing what he knows now, we'd have to calibrate it against the fact that computers in the 1970s simply weren't as capable as the beasts we have today.
> if he'd had the chance to have a second go of it
In a sense, he did. Take a look at RFC 4838.
I was at a talk where he brought up exactly this (I also once did a talk alongside him, but that's a different story). He said there would be two changes:
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.
Doing this brings you close to OSI, which famously failed by being overcomplicated. The current design was implementable by zillions of cheap humans running cheap hardware.
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.
You’re definitely right — the tech stack travels through time along what’s called a “path dependent” trajectory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_dependence
> The current design was implementable by zillions of cheap humans running cheap hardware.
Yes and no. The current internet arguably does not work without a browser and a TLS stack anyway, neither of which is easily implementable (e.g. number of practically usable rendering engines is in the single digits). I mean, I can piece together an IP packet, too, but there's not that many usable services reachable that way.
A bad application can still open unencrypted connections. Imagine a shoddily written game with a chat function.
As someone who was there at the time, OSI certainly didn't fail by being "overcomplicated". It failed because a) they charged money to read the standards documents and b) TCP/IP already had so much deployment momentum that nothing was going to supplant it (we see proof of this in the fact that IPv6 also didn't achieve that). Edit: also c) there was no requirement (unlike RFCs) to have an interoperable reference implementation available. So the implementations that were created mostly didn't interoperate.
In your opinion, do you think Internet Protocol Version 8 (IPv8) [1] stands a chance to fix the mistakes of IPv6 after more than 20 years now?
Or there is too much inertia for IPv8 to overcome to become a truly backwards compatible extension / superset of IPv4?
Part of the reasons for the slow adoption of IPv6 was that it was never designed to be backwards compatible unlike IPv8.
1: https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-thain-ipv8-00.html
> In your opinion, do you think Internet Protocol Version 8 (IPv8) [1] stands a chance to fix the mistakes of IPv6 after more than 20 years now?
IPv8 solves precisely zero of the problems that is causing a 'slow' roll out of IPv6 / replacement of IPv4:
"""
So it's a matter of mathematical and physical fact that to expand the address size, you must change the protocol, and that means two things immediately:
You have to change the version number.
You have to add new code to handle the new version.
Furthermore, you don't want to split the Internet in two, so you must design a method of interworking between the old version and the new version. Annoyingly, you need to do that in a way that can be done completely in machines that know about the new version, because other machines don't know anything at all about the new version, by definition. So,
You need a coexistence technique so that updated systems, with the new protocol, can connect to old systems that know nothing of the new protocol. Two minutes of thought show that this third requirement has only two solutions:
(3A) Dual stack, in which the new machines speak both the old (IPv4) and new (IPng) protocol.
(3B) Translation, in which something translates addresses between the old and new protocols.
[…]
Incidentally, "IPv8" proponents often ask why IPv6 didn't simply stick some extra bits on the front of IPv4 addresses, instead of inventing a whole new format. Actually, we tried that: the "IPv4-Compatible IPv6 address" format was defined in [RFC3513] but deprecated by [RFC4291] because it turned out to be of no practical use for coexistence or transition. The related "IPv4-Mapped IPv6 address" format is still valid and has a role in the POSIX socket API. Mappings of this kind also figured in the moderately successful coexistence technologies known as 6to4 [RFC3056, RFC3068] and Teredo [RFC4380], which have now been overtaken by events.
"""
* https://github.com/becarpenter/book6/blob/main/01.%20Introdu...
* Interview with author of article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3jkZ1Ulz-s
> Actually, we tried that
I'm always fascinated by how many people think IPv6 adoption would have gone lightning-fast if we just used This One Weird Trick, where said trick has actually been tried and didn't help. They usually refuse to back down even after you tell them so.
This IPv8 document is not a serious proposal. The entire family of documents was published by a single person without collaboration from anyone else at IETF, and there has not been any work to integrate feedback from other IERF contributors (last I was aware of).
Anyone can publish an IETF draft document, it doesn't mean it's a serious proposal under consideration or will ever actually be implemented.
> Doing this brings you close to OSI, which famously failed by being overcomplicated.
We're slowly reinventing OSI, one step at a time: OSI had multiple sessions per transport connection (QUIC), 20 byte addresses (IPv6) and a directory system with public-key infrastructure (DANE, vCard, SSHFP, etc).
It's a shame TUBA (CLNP + TCP) failed.
> 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.
The "solving" of encryption with TLS should not be celebrated.
Everything needs to go over TLS/HTTP-443 because of middleware boxes basically blocking everything else by default in many cases, and so application/protocol designs have to shoehorn / kludge everything into a round hole even if it's a square peg.
Certainly I'd want everything to have encryption at the higher layers (OSI 5-7), but having opportunistic encryption at IP (OSI 3) would also be great because snoopers could tell that two nodes are communicating but not how / what: RTSP? Torrent? Mindcraft? PvP2 game? If every node could (say) do an IKEv2 negotiation with every other node have IP-level traffic wrapped in IPsec that would help with traffic analysis.
It would depend on whether the computers back then could handle that (along with all the crypto algorithms in their infancy) when A:\ and B:\ weren't even a thing.
Not like CP/CMS predates the Internet or anything... /s
There’s a whole body of work in the form of public statements and documents from Vint Cerf on that topic. You could explore Google for hours…
https://spectrum.ieee.org/vint-cerf-mistakes
When I was in elementary school in the 90s I was doing a project about this new (to me) thing called “the internet.” My mom helped me cold email Vint and he sent me a very nice reply. Never forgot that.
I first heard about this internet thing from Cliff Stoll in The Cuckoo’s Egg. I got on a few years later.
For all that we complain, it’s still the most amazing thing ever.
Worked with some of his team when I was at MCI/Worldcom. We stand on the shoulders of giants.
I still remember back in 2005 when I just joined a company, a coworker was quipping Google is not a real elite company, because it doesn't even have a Turing Award winner. I showed him the news that Vint Cerf joined Google recently.
Now they have several Turing Award winners, and several Nobel Prize winners.
I wonder if the transformer inventors will ever get a Turing (honestly proving to be one of the most transformative - no pun intended - technologies of the millennium so far). I know pretty much all of them left Google but they'd still be counted as alumni.
Yeah, some work from Google has had an outsize impact on the entire industry. Won't be surprising if they eventually get a nod from the Turing Award. Including the main authors of the Transformer work for driving the LLM revolution, and Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat for driving the big data movement.
Will we still be able to get ipv4 addresses?
A genuine innovator
No matter what you think of Google
Google can't tarnish Vint Cerf.
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.
Wasn’t the first time, for him, but he has managed to keep his name in the clear.
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…
His name shows up in Epstein files as #1 on Epstein's list of scientists
https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA003070...
It doesn't indicate Epstein even met with Cerf. It looks like a wish list.
And this folks is exactly the reason we need to remember that there are real costs to demanding transparency. There's a reason some things should have stayed redacted.
I may be biased since I interned at Google in 2013 and 2014, but Google in the 2000s and early 2010s felt downright magical as someone who wanted to pursue a career in systems software research. They made impressive technologies that still hold up today, like MapReduce, BigTable, and Spanner. They hired many legends of computer science and software engineering, such as Rob Pike and Jeff Dean.
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.
> who wanted to pursue a career in systems software research
I interacted with many professors in OS research and other adjacent systems fields when touring grad schools and I heard or saw that some were extremely toxic or intense compared to other fields I saw. With OS at least, big tech companies seem to hold a lot of influence over research directions (eg. so much of it is specifically for AI datacenters, or for one company's AI datacenter problems), and I asked OS professors about this and got disheartened replies that there was nothing they could do because of the incentives in the field. I was quite disillusioned. I know that AI being a hot new topic makes leaves more stones unturned and might lead to more publishability, but it's still depressing.
I’m out of the loop these days in systems research since I largely focus on programming languages and AI these days (though I still love systems) and I treat research more as a side hobby rather than a full-fledged career. It’s disappointing to hear about toxic systems labs. There’s also the “funding-or-perish” and “publish-or-perish” pressures of academia. This is one of the reasons why I teach at a community college, where 8 months of the year I focus on teaching, leaving me 4 months of break per year where I could do research without having to worry about my tenure chances or about funding, though it would be nice to be able to pay some students to help with research projects, and it would also be nice to have the funds to buy expensive equipment such as GPUs with large amounts of RAM.
That seems like a great setup, and maybe something I'll think about after grad school (or maybe look into being a professor at LACs or less research oriented schools)! I'm already sort of nervous about doing the PhD because of the insane toxicity I've encountered and the pressure to do research in direct support of industry (which is probably exacerbated by NSF funding being impossible to get), but hopefully I'll find things to enjoy about it. The career prospects also seem tenuous, as a lot of outcomes seem to be "go through a brutal tenure process" or work for FAANG/adjacent (probably not even in research since places like MSR are difficult to get). But I would like the creative freedom a professorship might offer.
I'm relatively young and my first exposure to life and work of Vint Cerf was through DTN and Interplanetary Internet. What a life of accomplishment!
Know him in real life. Don’t meet your heroes.
> a relatively good career
What's that for?
I believe it's what is called a joke. I'm with you, I don't like them either.
It's written down so no body language.
The video probably shows a wide smile whilst saying it.
I worked on the ARPANET project under Steve Crocker at UCLA and met his bud Vint there (with his ever-present 3 piece suit, briefcase, and hearing aids) ... what a great guy.
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.
Sounds like he was frustrated he lost and thought the program was a lot more clever than it was. :)
How amazing it must be to be called the 'father' of something that everyone uses... I'm envious. Could I ever create something like that? As a programmer, the dream is always to build something that others actually use properly.
My "When I met Vint" story is less exciting then some here. He attended the "Disability Support Group" at Google regularly. He made a point of just being there to listen and support others.
IP on everything :D
So, uh, are they hiring a replacement "Internet Evangelist"? I love the internet, I could evangelize!
How many "father's of the Internet" are there exactly?
Exactly as many as the USA has founding fathers, give or take a few. Which is to say less than in the Fathers of Mercy.
Al Gore is definitely one of them!
> Al Gore is definitely one of them!
Absolutely correct — and that's not sarcasm or irony. (Gore never claimed to have "invented the Internet"; that was a calumny spread by Republicans.)
1999 CNN interview where Gore stated: "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet".
And that was true, within his context as senator. He was instrumental in passing the laws that fostered the Internet.
It’s astonishing, I know, but the heavily-parroted meme was always reductive and is, at this point, misnformation.
> Al Gore is definitely one of them!
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...
> There's always some nincompoop who brings that up. Al Gore deserves credit for what he did as a senator and vice president. He helped to pass legislation that enabled the NSFNET backbone to grow and to permit commercial traffic to flow on the government-sponsored backbones in the US. Had he not done that, it's pretty likely that the commercial sector would not have seen an opportunity to create a commercial internet that all of us can enjoy, so he does deserve some credit for what he's done.
— Vint Cerf, Tracking the Internet into the 21st Century <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hf0rjtnwC9A>
You have to wonder about the "Mother of the Internet" at this point...
DoD
Radia Perlman is the name that jumps to mind for me, but there are a bunch of others.
Ooh, several of those as well! Sibling comment mentions Radia Perlman. She invented Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) which prevents loops in wiring from taking down networks. (Plug an Ethernet cable into the same switch it comes out of.) This has saved everyone's bacon countless times. Elizabeth Feinler managed hostnames before there was DNS and helped establish several of the top level domains (TLD)s we use today. There's Karen Spärck Jones without whom, search engines wouldn't be what they are today. Judy Estrin helped with TCP/IP, Sally Floyd worked on congestion control algorithms, without which, the Internet would have gotten all choked up and never gotten off the ground. Susan Estrada helped commercialize the Internet, with her work on internet exchanges (IX), and Jean Armour Polly gets credit for coining the phrase "surfing the Internet." but should be better known for pioneering public Internet access and for her work with families and kids getting online.
These women played a critical role in creating the Internet we have today.
The two that are most widely recognized are Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, for TCP/IP, but that's just the start of it. There's JCR Licklider, who first imagined a global network of computers. There's Leonard Kleinrock, first ARPANET nod and packet-switching theory. Larry Roberts, who led development of ARPANET. Paul Baran independently invented packet switching. Donald Davies coined the term "packet" and also developed packet switching. Louis Pouzin also worked on TCP/IP. Jon Postel managed the IP standards and address assignments for decades. Ray Tomlinson invented email and the @ sign. Of course, we can't forget Tim Berneres-Lee, to whom we credit the invention of the web (HTTP, HTML, URLS, the first web browser and server).
So, eleven.
The Dream Machine is a history book by M. Mitchell Waldrop that tells the story of JCR Licklider.
Vannevar Bush?
Ooh, hadn't heard of him. From Wikipedia, V. Bush is famous for, among other things, creating the NSF, the memex, an analog microfilm precusor to hypertext, and his essay "As We May Think" in 1945. Definitely influential in the creation of our world today!
Vint cerf now vintage cerf
Thank you. May your peace continue.
Nitpicking: a father of the internet not the father. There is more than one.
I'm reading "where the wizards stay up late", and I was thinking the same thing. It's difficult to keep track of who is who but I'm pretty certain Cerf has appeared yet. I'm not that far through.
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!)
Thanks! We’ve updated the title.
Eh? Vint is KNOWN AS "the father of the Internet", and that's what TFA's title says.
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.
The title of your second link is "The Fathers of the Internet" and Robert Kahn as co-inventor of TCP/IP protocol is also considered a father of the internet.
BTW if I google father of the internet I get Cerf and Kahn or it says "a father"
I know what the title says, of course ... but the title is descriptive, not a label, and only Cerf is referred to as the father, as quoted. And yes of course Kahn co-invented TCP/IP but no one ever calls him father of the Internet. And I already said what happens if you google "father of the Internet" -- what I said is actually true.
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.
And man, for someone who calls something "nitpicking" to dig so deep into it ...
> and is recognized as one of "the fathers of the Internet"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vint_Cerf
> Widely known as one of the “Fathers of the Internet,
https://www.internethalloffame.org/vint-cerf/
> Together with Vint Cerf, Kahn is known as "the father of the Internet." https://computerhistory.org/profile/robert-kahn/
So much for "but no one ever calls him father of the Internet."
It’s widely recognized that the internet has multiple fathers.
Thought this was about Tim Berners-Lee, he is the only father I know.
Father of the web sure. But HTTP is not the Internet!
Which also shows there isn’t “one father”, multiple things (and people) had to come together.
And the Web is not HTTP!
he the mother
[flagged]
Imagine creating internet to connect people and live to see the day that most internet traffic is Bot and AI talk to each other is fascinating
I wonder what he feeling about it
The dude is in his 80s, he should have been allowed to retire decades ago.
Lots of people continue working because they enjoy it and to keep busy.
When I retire, I'm working on my stuff, not anyone else's. :)
I was forced to retire, at 55. Good ol’ SV ageism at work. Wasn’t happy about it -at all, but I’m fortunate, in having the means to do so.
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.
I had to look up SV
SillyCon Valley
He doesn't need to work, and he isn't really retiring even now. He is leaving Google but will be working on the interplanetary internet
He made millions last 20 years at Google without doing much and just being a honorary post, not sure what he feels about BS jobs like this
Vint took what could have been a prestige emeritus position at Google and turned it into a platform to champion accessibility and “Greyglers”. The man has more class than his suits.
Of all the millionaires in the world, I feel he’s earned a little bit of monetary recognition for his achievements.
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 couldn't disagree more.
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
I was impressed with Vint Cerf when I saw him at a distance but once I had dealings with him about issues such as: the way the internet has become a pernicious influence, how the ACM is an industry group for computer science professors that doesn't support practitioners [1], the ACM's support for H-1B visas [2] I came to the conclusion that this quote is about him:
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21810-it-is-difficult-to-ge...
[1] open access journals were a big step forward, but I was open access decades before
[2] i'll join a club which is neutral on the issue, but I can't accept the positive position, not because I feel it threatens me but because it pains me to see a brilliant data scientist being jerked around (bad enough that the HR lady leaves) and not being able to tell him "your skills are in demand and you can find another employer on the other side of the street" (this is NYC) And the argument that "startups" need it is bogus: Google can take a chance on a lottery, a key employee at a startup is key however.