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.
Vint Cerf, “father of the Internet”, is retiring
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Re: Vint Cerf, “father of the Internet”, is retiring
#22I 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
Re: Vint Cerf, “father of the Internet”, is retiring
#23The dude is in his 80s, he should have been allowed to retire decades ago.
Re: Vint Cerf, “father of the Internet”, is retiring
#24I 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.
Re: Vint Cerf, “father of the Internet”, is retiring
#25Re: Vint Cerf, “father of the Internet”, is retiring
#26I'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!
Re: Vint Cerf, “father of the Internet”, is retiring
#27I 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.
Re: Vint Cerf, “father of the Internet”, is retiring
#28A 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.
Re: Vint Cerf, “father of the Internet”, is retiring
#29I 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?"
Re: Vint Cerf, “father of the Internet”, is retiring
#30The 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.