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Vint Cerf, “father of the Internet”, is retiring

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Re: Vint Cerf, “father of the Internet”, is retiring

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Vint had an interview?!! Who had the gall to suggest he needs to come in and be evaluated?

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.

Re: Vint Cerf, “father of the Internet”, is retiring

#155
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 encr…

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.

> 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.

Re: Vint Cerf, “father of the Internet”, is retiring

#157

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 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…

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 =)

Re: Vint Cerf, “father of the Internet”, is retiring

#158
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pac…

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!

Re: Vint Cerf, “father of the Internet”, is retiring

#159
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Vint Cerf, “father of the Internet”, is retiring

#160

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.

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.

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