alt Hacker NewsVint Cerf, “father of the Internet”, is retiring
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I worked on the ARPANET project under Steve Crocker at UCLA and met his bud Vint there (with his ever-present 3 piece suit, briefcase, and hearing aids) ... what a great guy.
An anecdote: I wrote a program (in Sigma-7 assembler I think) to play Jotto--a bit like Mastermind but with 5 letter words. Vint loved to poke around in people's directories to see what they were up to and found my program. He played it a few times, and then collared me to ask me a couple of questions: 1) It seemed to know some of the words he entered but not all -- what was up with that? 2) What sort of AI algorithm was I using for the program to make guesses? (It usually beat the human player.)
Answers: 1) I didn't have a digitized dictionary (it was 1969!) so I hand-entered the five letter words from a pocket dictionary but got tired halfway through so it only knew words starting with a-l. 2) The program would eliminate any words that didn't fit the responses to its guesses so far and then pick a remaining word at random.
Upon hearing my answers Vint walked away in disgust! But years later he gave me a recommendation when I interviewed with Google (it didn't work out for other reasons).
I also shared a cubicle wall with another Van Nuys High alumni, Jon Postel, aka "God of the Internet". Sartorially, Jon was the complete opposite of Vint--long scraggly beard, blue jeans, forever barefoot--but those weren't the things that mattered. Man, those were the days.
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.
I 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
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 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.
Anyone know what he actually did at Google? Was it an active role, did he publish anything interesting? Or was it more of an Institute for Advanced Study kind of position?
I remember watching Lo and Behold by Werner Herzog and just going how dedicated the internet pioneers were working in their 70s and beyond.
Legends
Had the pleasure of having dinner with Vint one evening. Such an amazing person. So incredibly humble and one of the most genuine people Ive ever met. As an aside, I asked him directly about the Al Gore internet meme and he said point blank that if it weren't for Als work in Washington the Internet wouldn't exist in its current form.
But yeah, just an awesome guy all around. One of the few people I consider to be a source of inspiration for me.
When I was in elementary school in the 90s I was doing a project about this new (to me) thing called “the internet.” My mom helped me cold email Vint and he sent me a very nice reply. Never forgot that.
Vint and I have been corresponding on and off for years over email and text. He's incredible. A friend had his startup business about to fail because the domain was stolen by Chinese hackers; they had been to court, but the judgments were going to take forever to enforce after the courts sided in their favor. So, I asked Vint what we could do. He said he was sitting with the head of ICANN and would inform him. He is truly one of the greatest minds and most genuine people of our time. Thank you for every interaction, Vint. I hope you enjoy retirement.
For those interested in early internet pioneers, Wired did a collab with the internet society around the 1st group of folks inducted into the Hall of Fame, where wired independently wrote profiles of almost all of them.
https://www.internethalloffame.org/tag/2012/
Click on a profile, scroll to the bottom and click the Wired link
My "When I met Vint" story is less exciting then some here. He attended the "Disability Support Group" at Google regularly. He made a point of just being there to listen and support others.
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.
He visited the Google Kenya office in Nairobi and then did a brief talk at the local tech hub, iHub, where someone asked him what his opinion was on bearing an uncanny resemblance to the architect of the matrix, I don't think he had watched the movie because the question escaped him. It's worth pointing out he was hard of hearing so may be he just didn't hear it clearly.
I met Vint twice where I spent about an hour each time talking to him in a group. It was years apart and he spoke about the social changes the Internet was bringing about. Always well spoken and thoughtful. It was impressive and I really appreciated was he had to say.
Worked with some of his team when I was at MCI/Worldcom. We stand on the shoulders of giants.
Things like this always make me feel how young the computer industry is, and how fast it has developed.
I 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.
A genuine innovator
No matter what you think of Google
Hey, I met Vint once at a conference - we were talking about some subsea fiber projects I was involved with. At the time he was working on interplanetary IP (IPIP? jk), which I thought was pretty stellar. Nice guy and very curious - qualities we should all work hard to foster.
I once shared a proposal at Google that Vint commented on and encouraged me to follow up on. I haven't, but it certainly made my year :)
I have always thought that The architect from The Matrix series looks like Vint Cerf. I wonder if Wachowskis had Vint in mind when casting
I had the privileged of seeing him deliver at Keynote at IEEE GlobeCom in 2019. He was funny, an amazing presenter, and very down to earth.
I first heard about this internet thing from Cliff Stoll in The Cuckoo’s Egg. I got on a few years later.
For all that we complain, it’s still the most amazing thing ever.
I worked with him at CNRI. Seemed pretty dim and overrated. I think people keep him around for the DARPA connection.
I'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!
Oh no. But who will write the poem if Vint Cerf is the one retiring?
How many "father's of the Internet" are there exactly?
Will we still be able to get ipv4 addresses?
IP on everything :D
Vint cerf now vintage cerf
Thank you. May your peace continue.
So, uh, are they hiring a replacement "Internet Evangelist"? I love the internet, I could evangelize!
Nitpicking: a father of the internet not the father. There is more than one.
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Thought this was about Tim Berners-Lee, he is the only father I know.
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Imagine creating internet to connect people and live to see the day that most internet traffic is Bot and AI talk to each other is fascinating
I wonder what he feeling about it
The dude is in his 80s, he should have been allowed to retire decades ago.
He made millions last 20 years at Google without doing much and just being a honorary post, not sure what he feels about BS jobs like this
I was impressed with Vint Cerf when I saw him at a distance but once I had dealings with him about issues such as: the way the internet has become a pernicious influence, how the ACM is an industry group for computer science professors that doesn't support practitioners [1], the ACM's support for H-1B visas [2] I came to the conclusion that this quote is about him:
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on
his not understanding it.”
― Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked
[1] open access journals were a big step forward, but I was open access decades before
[2] i'll join a club which is neutral on the issue, but I can't accept the positive position, not because I feel it threatens me but because it pains me to see a brilliant data scientist being jerked around (bad enough that the HR lady leaves) and not being able to tell him "your skills are in demand and you can find another employer on the other side of the street" (this is NYC) And the argument that "startups" need it is bogus: Google can take a chance on a lottery, a key employee at a startup is key however.
I met Vint at the Kech Institute for Space Studies. He arrived to help us look at in-space data centers for planetary science throughout the solar system. He was a big proponent of delay-tolerant networking and other useful networking stacks, so he was the "rep" for that layer of problems.
Just the nicest guy you could imagine. He took the note-takers job during our breakouts, had beers with us after the session, and asked really good questions and never asserted anything the whole time.
What a legend.