The medal is the highest civilian award given by the United States to its citizens. In together with Robert Kahn, he received the Franklin Medal. During his tenure from with the U. 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. 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. They get started in '94 and went public in ' The stock went through the roof, the dot-com boom was on, and investors poured money into anything that looked like Internets until April That is when the dot-com bubble burst.
But even after that, the network continued to grow extremely rapidly because the underlying service functionality was attractive. There was a huge influx of content to the Internet. People wanted to share what they knew and there was no expectation that they would be compensated for it. They just wanted to know that this information was useful for somebody else.
It is one of those amazing altruistic events because there was this ocean of content, but nobody could find anything. That is when browser search engines started popping up like AltaVista, Yahoo, and eventually Google. You can see these stages, where the consequences of a previous development induce the next one that is needed. Of course, this is now big business, but as I was watching these events occur and unfold, you could not predict them all.
The most interesting milestone came in when Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone. The mobile phone had been around for a while and coincidently, Marty Cooper started working on the first mobile phone at Motorola the same year Bob and I started working on the Internet. Both the Internet and mobile phones were progressing in parallel for decades, but the two technologies suddenly combined in Suddenly, these two technologies became hypergolic.
The Internet became more accessible thanks to the smartphone, and the smartphone became more useful because of access to all the content and functionality on the Internet. The result was that a much larger fraction of the global population could now access the Internet. High: You have had extraordinary influence in a number of fields, from academia to the government to non-profits to name a few. I am curious how you decide to spend your time and more broadly, how you have managed your career.
Cerf: Unlike many of my colleagues, I am incapable of doing more than one thing at a time. All the institutions with which I have become affiliated at one time or another had some connections to the Internet.
Even my coming to Google was related to Internet because Google would not exist if there were not the platform on top of which the World Wide Web could run. Tim Berners Lee has been clear that if there had not been an Internet available, the World Wide Web may not have propagated.
I am also concerned about issues that are associated with the Internet, such as digital preservation. I am worried about the trillions of photographs that get taken that may not be visible in 10 or 20 years because the equipment they are stored on is not readable anymore, or we do not know how to interpret the bits to turn them into images. In , Vint and Bob received the highest civilian honor bestowed in the U.
It recognizes the fact that their work on the software code used to transmit data across the Internet has put them "at the forefront of a digital revolution that has transformed global commerce, communication, and entertainment.
During his tenure with the U. Robert E. CNRI was created as a not-for-profit organization to provide leadership and funding for research and development of the National Information Infrastructure. After receiving a B. Kahn earned M. He took a leave of absence from MIT to join Bolt Beranek and Newman, where he was responsible for the system design of the Arpanet, the first packet-switched network.
While Director of IPTO he initiated the United States government's billion dollar Strategic Computing Program, the largest computer research and development program ever undertaken by the federal government.
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