Cerf also served as founding president of the Internet Society from and in served a term as chairman of the Board. In addition, Cerf is honorary chairman of the IPv6 Forum, dedicated to raising awareness and speeding introduction of the new Internet protocol.
Cerf served as a member of the U. Presidential Information Technology Advisory Committee PITAC from to and has served on several national, state and industry committees focused on cyber-security. Cerf also sat on the Board of Associates of Gallaudet University until He serves on the Jet Propulsion Laboratory Advisory Committee and is a distinguished visiting scientist there.
National Institute of Standards and Technology during Cerf is a recipient of numerous additional awards and commendations in connection with his work on the Internet. Cyril and St. In he received a Lifetime Webby Award. In , he received the Colombian Murillo Toro medal for communications. In weaker economies, affordability is a big issue, and the rationale for investing in Internet infrastructure is not necessarily obvious.
As our conversation continued, however, he shared several concerns about the future of his creation. He indicates that his goal is to determine how to make the internet safer, more secure, and more private. To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please visit this link. This is the 25th interview in the IT Influencers series. He deserves huge credit, as do tens of thousands of other people since that time. You do not do anything on this scale without a huge amount of willing collaboration and commitment.
The idea was to link all their computers together so they could share their resources, computing capabilities, and results to make progress more quickly. The challenge was how to connect those machines together since the circuit switching technology at the time would have been too slow for the interactions we needed. Packet switching, on the other hand, is more like electronic postcards. They get lost and they come out of order.
You must do a bunch of little things to make a postcard postal service work reliably, and the same is true for packet switching. After I finished my Ph. He came to my lab and said, "We have a problem. However, this would require us to put computers in mobile vehicles, ships at sea, and airplanes, in addition to fixed installations. Obviously, these could not be wired connections, and we were going to have to use mobile radio and satellites in addition to the dedicated telephone circuits that we were using to build ARPANET.
The problem was that the packet switch nets differed in terms of sizes, speeds, and delays. We started working on this problem in the spring of We began detailing the design in January and published a paper in May of that year. The next several years involved implementation and testing and discovery of mistakes and their repair, so we iterated several times until we ended up with a final specification in which we froze.
By that time, we had split the Internet Protocol [IP] off from the Transmission Control Protocol [TCP] to deal with real-time communications that did not require reliability but required timeliness. With radar communication, for example, you do not want to know where the missile was, you want to know where it is now. You do not need to retransmit old information because it is not of any use.
We split the protocols into TCP and IP, and we created something called a User Datagram Protocol which gave the users access to this real-time communications channel. We continued implementation across as many operating systems as we could and on January 1, , we turned the Internet on. Without going into another 20 years of history, the National Science Foundation NSF picked up the idea and funded the creation of the National Science Foundation Backbone Network and about a dozen intermediate elements to connect 3, universities around the US into this growing Internet system.
They contributed an enormous amount to the absolute growth of the system and made some important decisions that allowed the network to eventually become a commercial service. High: At what point in that journey did you see the broader commercial and global implications of what you were creating?
Cerf: There were milestones that helped me understand the implications of this. The earliest milestones preceded the Internet. It captured everyone's attention because it was so convenient to be able to communicate without both parties being awake at the same time.
That allowed us to undertake projects where people could cooperate across substantial geographic distances and time zones. We also saw the beginnings of the first mailing lists. One of them was called Sci-fi Lovers where us geeks would arguing over who the best science fiction writer was. Douglas Engelbart at SRI International developed the Online System, which was a document production and sharing operation that included hyperlinking to let you associate one-word document with another.
To activate these hyperlinks, he had to invent the mouse so you could point to the link on the display and click it.
This was like a World Wide Web in a box, and we were conscious of the capabilities that this networking environment offered even before we started the Internet project. As the Internet project got going, we were thinking about command and control, about video and audio, and about text and data. We were experimenting with packetized voice and packetized video in the mid '70s and early '80s, and while we could not do much because there was not a lot of capacity, we were already pursuing what we think of as commonplace today.
Technologically speaking, we were conscious of how powerful that could be. The commercialization was interesting because there was nothing commercial about the Internet until early when Cisco Systems started building routers and selling them commercially. That was done by Bill Joy at Berkeley, and we started to see substantial growth by That is when I started thinking how to get Internet into the hands of the public and make it self-sustaining because up until that time, the government was the only source of support.
This led me to wonder how we would make it apparent to the private sector that there might be a business offering Internet services, and not just Internet software and equipment. Up until that point, NSF and the other government agencies said they did not want any commercial traffic to flow on the backbones because these systems were for government research and academic facilities.
In , I thought of connecting the MCI Mail system to the Internet as a test to see whether we could get the protocols that would enable email services to work together.
Of course, my motive was to try to break the logjam that said you cannot have any commercial traffic on the Internet backbone and the Federal Networking Council FNC , which was the authority at the time, agreed to let us do that for a finite period. When we turned this capability on in , the other commercial email providers such as Telemail, Telenet, and Compuserve said they also wanted to have access, so they got permission from the FNC.
They got hooked up to the Internet and commercial traffic started flowing on the backbone. What shocked them was that the heretofore isolated independent e-mail services were suddenly interconnected with each other. Because they were adopting the same protocols and formats that allowed for interoperability, anybody on any of those services could communicate with anybody else. This was a surprise because they thought they had a trapped a cohort of customers, but suddenly they could talk to everybody.
Having three commercial Internet services in was a huge moment. Some of my colleagues thought it was crazy to commercialize the Internet, but I thought it would be useful for people to have access to the system.
This all predated the development of the World Wide Web, which began around '89 and became visible with Tim Berners Lee in ' I do not think many people noticed when Tim announced the first version, but Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina at the National Center for Supercomputer Applications saw this idea and added a graphical user interface which they called Mosaic.
The Mosaic browser was a hit, and everybody was stunned that the Internet could look like a magazine with formatted text and imagery. This galvanized everybody's recognition of potential, especially around advertising.
In his recent work, Dr. Kahn has been developing the concept of a digital object architecture as a key middleware component of the NII. This notion is providing a framework for interoperability of heterogeneous information systems and is being used in many applications such as the Digital Object Identifier DOI.
He is a co-inventor of Knowbot programs, mobile software agents in the network environment. Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery. Kahn received the Digital ID World award for the Digital Object Architecture as a significant contribution technology, policy or social to the digital identity industry.
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