[ih] EXCERPTing from "Ruminating with VINT CERF" interview

[the keyboard of geoff goodfellow]

OLD GOATS with Jonathan Alter
Sep 9:

[...]

*JON:*

*When you and Bob Kahn founded the Internet in 1973, was there an “Aha”
moment where you're working on these packets and one day you go, “We've got
it now!”*

*VINT CERF:*

No, absolutely not. This was an engineering effort--not like discovery.
This is more like, “I have a problem. What are the boundary conditions of
the problem and what solutions could work?” The ARPANET had been based on
packet switching and it was intended to be a resource for sharing time on
different brands of computers, which was a hard problem to solve.

JON:

*Getting these different brands and machines to talk to each other?*

*VINT CERF:*

The challenge here was that there were many different companies making
computers and we had quite a different collection of them on the ARPANET
because of the various universities that were being supported by [the
government network]. There were more computer companies then. [Our
intention] was to allow researchers to share each other's software and
computing capability across the network, instead of having to buy new
computers every year for everybody.

JON:

*Is it fair to say that the larger goal of DARPA was survivability in case
of a nuclear war?*

*VINT CERF:*

No, that’s a confusion with a *1962 RAND Corporation report focused on post
nuclear attack survival <https://www.rand.org/about/history/baran.html>*.
Bob [Kahn] had gone to DARPA in 1972 and now the question was, having
demonstrated the utility of computer networking, can we use the computers
to assist us in command-and-control? It means you're doing both numeric and
non- numeric computation, including voice, video and data. How do we build
networks that don't lose airplanes, mobile vehicles, ships at sea? So we
then had to develop packet radio for mobile communication—airborne and
ground base—and satellite communication, especially for long distance ships
at sea. [Then we had to figure out] how do we hook all these different
kinds of packet switch nets together and make the whole shebang work.

 There is a wider range of challenges associated with using multiple
networks with different bandwidths, different data rates, different delays
and latencies and so on. So that was the Internet challenge.

*JON:*

*Right, so then it's not til the 1980s—10 years later— before the rest of
us can go on the Internet. Why did it take so long before it left the
government and academia and became something that the whole world could
use?*

*VINT CERF:*

It was not easy to figure out how to make it work. It took a small group of
us four iterations of protocol design [before] ultimately ending up with
this TCP and IP split that was capable of supporting video and voice and
data. I spent five years or so promoting implementation of the protocols on
various computer operating systems, getting it done at IBM, Hewlett
Packard, and Digital Equipment Corporation in their research labs.

And around then we’re starting to see some European interest in this, in
spite of the fact that there is a huge collision that began in 1978 and we
were in conflict over what was going to be the international standard until
about 1993.

JON:

*Wow, but you guys won. If you had lost, how would the world be different?*

*VINT CERF:*

 Well, you'd be running a different suite of protocols. They would probably
work, but they would be much more complicated and elaborate and in my
opinion, they'd be more clumsy. Your email addresses would not be anything
as simple as we have today. They [European protocols] were just horrendous.
There was something just overbearing about the seven-layer design that they
pushed. We won only because we had real world experience and real products
and services.

*You got to Google in 2005 which was just a year after Gmail was developed.
When you look back at the last 16 years there, what would you tell your
grandchildren about what it’s like? What stands out for you in that period
in terms of your own contributions and the way the world changed?*

*VINT CERF:*

Well, you know I got hired as the Chief Internet Evangelist, a title I
didn't ask for. They asked what title do you want and I said: “Archduke.”

[...]

https://oldgoats.substack.com/p/ruminating-with-vint-cerf
-- 
Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com
living as The Truth is True