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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

#161

Post by fragmede »

My_Name wrote: post #65
p1dda wrote: post #59

How many "father's of the Internet" are there exactly?

You have to wonder about the "Mother of the Internet" at this point...

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.

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

#162

Post by Vaslo »

jibal wrote: post #51
djtriptych wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I took it as a... joke... Can we post jokes?? Everyone knows Al Gore didn't sit around in an SV garage inventing the internet.

It's not so much a joke as a smear. Gore was attacked for claiming to be the inventor of the Internet, but he never said that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_and_information_techno...

[flagged]

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

#163

Post by tty456 »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #156
mehulashah wrote: post #118

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.

[flagged]

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?

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

#164

Post by ocdtrekkie »

tty456 wrote: post #163
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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.

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

#165

Post by pix128 »

Sesse__ wrote: post #87
hyperman1 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A bad application can still open unencrypted connections. Imagine a shoddily written game with a chat function.

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

#166

Post by tomhow »

Vaslo wrote: post #40
tomhow wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don’t post snarky or low-substance comments on HN. 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.

[flagged]

I had already looked up the full quote; it’s right there with the full context in the Al Gore and information technology Wikipedia article [1].

In a 1999 interview with Wolf Blitzer, he said “During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet.” What he meant was that he sponsored the legislation that enabled the Internet to be accessible to the public, and several key Internet figures including Vint Cerf acknowledge his crucial role in enabling the Internet to become a public utility, which was not a given prior to his efforts.

Sure, he was talking himself up in the lead-up to the election and his language could have been more precise, but it was on off-hand remark in an interview, not a prepared speech or published text, and he clearly never claimed he “invented the Internet”.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_and_information_techno...

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

#167

Post by tomhow »

tosti wrote: post #39
tomhow wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don’t post snarky or low-substance comments on HN. 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.

You can just hide things you don't like, or y'know, live and let live.

It’s dispiriting when someone has to chime in with the predictable/lame comment on any topic. We want HN to be better than that.

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

#168

Post by tomhow »

djtriptych wrote: post #34
tomhow wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don’t post snarky or low-substance comments on HN. 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.

I took it as a... joke... Can we post jokes?? Everyone knows Al Gore didn't sit around in an SV garage inventing the internet.

To me it counts as a trope and the guidelines ask as to avoid posting Internet tropes, for the very reason that they’re more likely to elicit a groan than a laugh.

We’d love to see good jokes on HN, but they’re a precious rarity. (See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7609289.)

I guess this one stings because I hate that HN is a place where our idea of a joke is mocking the work of a politician who really is credited by the pioneering technologists of the field to to have played a crucial role in enabling our industry to develop.

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

#169

Post by nout »

ixaxaar wrote: post #141
skeeter2020 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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... ;)
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