Editor's Letter
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"This is a case whre people
like us are really building on the shoulders of giants." --Marc Andreessen, executive vice president, Netscape
Vinton Cerf has been hailed as the father of
the Internet. He co-created TCP/IP 24 years ago and broke down policy barriers,
a feat that turned the government-based network into a revolutionary commercial
medium.
Throughout his entire career, the 55-year-old Cerf has taken his love of science
fiction, his knowledge of computer science and his sensitivity toward humanity
and melded these qualities to vastly improve the way the entire world
communicates and gathers knowledge. The Internet has become the fastest-growing
communications network, touched by everyone from techies at NASA to
schoolchildren in rural America.
BORN:
June 23, 1943
EDUCATION: B.S. Mathematics, Stanford Universioty; M.S., PhD.,
Computer Science , UCLA
ACCOMPLISHMENT
Co-creator of TCP/IP, the common computer
language of the Internet
"Vint is many things and is probably as close to a renaissance man as there is
in the 21st century. He is part scientist, engineer, philosopher, businessperson
but perhaps, most of all, a great teacher. Not just in the sense of imparting
information, which he does very well, but in making you think and looking at not
just networks but life in a whole new perspective," said Fred Briggs, chief
engineering officer of MCI WorldCom and Cerf's boss for years.
On the brink of his professional career, barely graduated from UCLA and working
as an assistant professor at Stanford University, Cerf created the Internet
language Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) with his
partner Robert Kahn. Later with MCI Communications Corp. after creating one of
the industry's first commercial E-mail products, he worked to break the
government policy barrier that prohibited commercial contact with the
Internet.
Cerf is considered an authority on Internet matters, having formed the Internet
Society in 1992, and he is a national treasure to those in the high-tech
community as well as government circles, as was illustrated last December when
he received the U.S. National Medal of Technology from President Clinton. And
yet, despite his fame and influence, everyone who knows Cerf said he is an
extremely kind and humble man.
His never-ending contribution to the Internet's success has made him a hero of
budding Internet pioneers in recent years. "This is a case where people like us
are really building on the shoulders of giants," said Marc Andreessen, executive
vice president of Netscape Communications Corp., who invented the graphical user
interface, or browser, to Cerf's Internet.
Research into the Internet initially began in the early 1960s when people
explored the idea of packet switching, which involved sending data in individual
packets to different destinations. This led to a major experiment in the late
1960s called the ARPAnet, a large wide-area packet switching network funded by
the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, later known as ARPA. Cerf's
involvement in this network began when he was a graduate student at UCLA and
worked with a group of researchers who tested and analyzed how the network
worked. He helped to design the software used by the computers in order to
communicate, called the host-to-host protocol, or the Network Control
Program.
"This was really breaking very new ground. No one quite knew exactly what it
meant to build a computer communications network, and so we were out there
exploring territory that was largely terra incognita," Cerf said.
In 1972 Cerf received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from UCLA and participated
in a public demonstration in Washington, D.C., at a major computer conference,
the International Conference on Computer Communication. It was the first time
the public had been exposed to packet switching and the notion of interactive
computing at a distance. It was also the year Cerf left UCLA and joined Stanford
to take a joint appointment as Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
professor.
At the same time, Kahn began new packet switching research at ARPA. He shared
design problems related to linking various packet nets together with Cerf, who
at Stanford in 1973 did research on advanced content in packet switch
networking.
That problem of connecting the different networks together became known as the
Inter-net problem. So in 1973, Cerf and Kahn began basic design for the Internet
and came up with an outline of the protocols needed to make this multinet work
in a transparent way.
In May 1974 the very first paper on the Internet was published by the two men.
Cerf continued to lead the development effort to turn TCP into a detailed
specification that people could write software to. Cerf left Stanford and went
to ARPA in 1976.
Much of Cerf's career revolves around testing, analyzing, scheming,
brainstorming and going back to the drawing board. But everything clicked in
1977 in what Cerf calls a "major milestone." A test involving the successful
communications between three different networks showed data communications going
from a mobile packet radio unit being driven up and down a San Francisco area
freeway, through ARPAnet, out a satellite link, and to a service site in Los
Angeles. The test illustrated an 88,000-mile round-trip to send packets 400
miles from Northern to Southern California.
No one truly knows the far-reaching impact Cerf's work will have on the world,
but one likely scenario would be that he brought better communications tools to
a group of people who struggle with communicating more than most others--the
hearing impaired. In fact, the Alexander Graham Bell Association awarded Cerf
with the Alexander Graham Bell Award earlier this year.
Cerf's wife, Sigrid, who had been completely deaf since age 3, said E-mail has
become the communications tool for the deaf and describes the traditional
telecommunications devices for the deaf as "about as intolerable as if we had a
telegraph system going today." Sigrid researched a new technology, via the
Internet, called cochlear implants, had the procedure two and half years ago and
hears perfectly today.
Now Cerf is looking to bring his expertise to learning about other worlds.
While still with MCI, a year ago Cerf began working with NASA's Jet Propulsion
Lab, Pasadena, Calif., to try to bring interplanetary capabilities to today's
Internet. Cerf is looking to develop technology to support the deployment of
standard Internet onto planetary and satellite surfaces on the moons of Jupiter,
Saturn, Mars and Venus. Standard Internet could be used in space vehicles
traveling throughout the solar system, as well as let the various pieces of
Internet interact with each other across interplanetary distances.
Cerf said he is far from having complete specifications but hopes his basic
design will be carried in not-too-distant space travel, such as the Mars
missions scheduled to start in the year 2001.
"We have only scratched the surface in terms of what will change [with the
Internet] with respect to how we live and work. Vint has the concept of the IP
chip in a light bulb where every device in the universe can communicate with all
other devices over a vast, seamless network. We cannot begin to comprehend what
those types of changes will bring to our lives in just a few short years, and
yet Vint is already laying the foundation to provide those capabilities not only
here on earth, but beyond," said MCI WorldCom's Briggs.
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