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Vint Cerf, “father of the Internet”, is retiring
- foota 3mo agoI 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 :)
- kappi 3mo agoHe 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
- sollewitt 3mo agoVint took what could have been a prestige emeritus position at Google and turned it into a platform to champion accessibility and “Greyglers”. The man has more class than his suits.
- sph 3mo agoOf all the millionaires in the world, I feel he’s earned a little bit of monetary recognition for his achievements. Had I coinvented TCP/IP, I’d gladly take a bullshit, cushy paying job in my latter half of my career as a ‘reward’
- fridek 3mo agoI couldn't disagree more. I personally witnessed Vint give valuable advice to managers like me, often in difficult cases. It sounds banal but often in a large corp you know what you need to do, but will have a lot of - justified or not - doubt about whether you can get through the bureaucratic molasses and the political interests of your higher ups. Vint's backing enabled a lot of people to do what's right. One of my colleagues has printed and framed a reply from such a thread, where he offered an opinion in support of another manger. Vint replied "This is good advice. V.". I hope he enjoys retirement, well deserved
- chips_not_fries 3mo agoA genuine innovator No matter what you think of Google
- echelon 3mo agoGoogle can't tarnish Vint Cerf. There are lots of brilliant people at Google who do no evil. The fact that the company makes evil decisions about the direction of the web, privacy, and performs blatantly monopolistic actions does not outweigh the good things people at Google have done. At least not yet. You can hate the company but love the brilliant work the engineers have done. The same can be said of lots of companies: Apple, Anthropic, ... Meta, on the other hand, I'm not so sure about. It's less of an overt monopoly, but some of its actions are heinously amoral.
- ChrisMarshallNY 3mo agoWasn’t the first time, for him, but he has managed to keep his name in the clear. He worked for MCI/Worldcomm, before Google. Bernie Ebbers went to jail, for that. Ahh… the good ol’ days, when we actually jailed scumbag billionaires, instead of voting massive pay bumps…
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- bflesch 3mo agoHis name shows up in Epstein files as #1 on Epstein's list of scientists https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA00307028.pdf https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA003070...
- jnwatson 3mo agoIt doesn't indicate Epstein even met with Cerf. It looks like a wish list.
- everfrustrated 3mo ago
- kulahan 3mo ago[flagged]
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- pwdisswordfishq 3mo ago> a relatively good career What's that for?
- cube00 3mo ago[flagged]
- TurdF3rguson 3mo ago[flagged]
- tonyhart7 3mo agoImagine 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
- croes 3mo agoNitpicking: a father of the internet not the father. There is more than one.
- pipes 3mo agoI'm reading "where the wizards stay up late", and I was thinking the same thing. It's difficult to keep track of who is who but I'm pretty certain Cerf has appeared yet. I'm not that far through. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Where-Wizards-Stay-Up-Late/dp/0684832674 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Where-Wizards-Stay-Up-Late/dp/06848... (Well actually I'm listening to it not reading, maybe that's why I can't keep track of the protagonists!)
- tomhow 3mo agoThanks! We’ve updated the title.
- jibal 3mo agoEh? Vint is KNOWN AS "the father of the Internet", and that's what TFA's title says. https://web.archive.org/web/20131104212006/http://deafness.about.com/cs/celebfeatures/a/vintoncerf.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20131104212006/http://deafness.a... > He is routinely referred to as "the father of the internet," There is no one else who is referred to that way. If you google "father of the Internet", Vint pops up. https://www.inmesol.com/blog/fathers-internet/ https://www.inmesol.com/blog/fathers-internet/ > Vinton Cerf (Connecticut, 1943) Considered to be the founding father of the Internet.
- croes 3mo agoThe title of your second link is "The Fathers of the Internet" and Robert Kahn as co-inventor of TCP/IP protocol is also considered a father of the internet. BTW if I google father of the internet I get Cerf and Kahn or it says "a father"
- jibal 3mo agoI know what the title says, of course ... but the title is descriptive, not a label, and only Cerf is referred to as the father, as quoted. And yes of course Kahn co-invented TCP/IP but no one ever calls him father of the Internet. And I already said what happens if you google "father of the Internet" -- what I said is actually true. And none of this is really relevant because it's TFA that should determine HN titles. But for better or worse the mod has made his decision, so this is moot -- I won't comment on it further. And man, for someone who calls something "nitpicking" to dig so deep into it ...
- raychis 3mo agoThought this was about Tim Berners-Lee, he is the only father I know.
- roschdal 3mo ago[flagged]
- tomhow 3mo agoPlease don’t post snarky or low-substance comments on HN. As another commenter has pointed out, Vint Cerf himself credits Gore as playing a significant role in enabling the Internet’s emergence. He didn’t claim to have “invented” it.
- djtriptych 3mo agoI took it as a... joke... Can we post jokes?? Everyone knows Al Gore didn't sit around in an SV garage inventing the internet.
- jibal 3mo agoIt's not so much a joke as a smear. Gore was attacked for claiming to be the inventor of the Internet, but he never said that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_and_information_technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_and_information_techno...
- tomhow 3mo agoTo me it counts as a trope and the guidelines ask as to avoid posting Internet tropes, for the very reason that they’re more likely to elicit a groan than a laugh. We’d love to see good jokes on HN, but they’re a precious rarity. (See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7609289 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7609289.) I guess this one stings because I hate that HN is a place where our idea of a joke is mocking the work of a politician who really is credited by the pioneering technologists of the field to to have played a crucial role in enabling our industry to develop.
- jdw64 3mo agoHow 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.
- Angostura 3mo agoI 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
- nubinetwork 3mo agoThe dude is in his 80s, he should have been allowed to retire decades ago.
- zeafoamrun 3mo agoLots of people continue working because they enjoy it and to keep busy.
- nubinetwork 3mo agoWhen I retire, I'm working on my stuff, not anyone else's. :)
- ChrisMarshallNY 3mo agoI was forced to retire, at 55. Good ol’ SV ageism at work. Wasn’t happy about it -at all, but I’m fortunate, in having the means to do so. That was almost nine years ago, and I actually increased my development work, with the caveat that no one pays me to do it, anymore. Probably one of the best things that ever happened to me, but I didn’t think so, at the time. I wish him luck.
- bookofjoe 3mo agoI had to look up SV
- ChrisMarshallNY 3mo agoSillyCon Valley
- pastor_williams 3mo agoHe doesn't need to work, and he isn't really retiring even now. He is leaving Google but will be working on the interplanetary internet
- wwind123 3mo agoI 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.
- FartyMcFarter 3mo agoNow they have several Turing Award winners, and several Nobel Prize winners.
- mahouk 3mo agoI wonder if the transformer inventors will ever get a Turing (honestly proving to be one of the most transformative - no pun intended - technologies of the millennium so far). I know pretty much all of them left Google but they'd still be counted as alumni.
- wwind123 3mo agoYeah, some work from Google has had an outsize impact on the entire industry. Won't be surprising if they eventually get a nod from the Turing Award. Including the main authors of the Transformer work for driving the LLM revolution, and Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat for driving the big data movement.
- Chu4eeno 3mo agoGoogle's transformer paper was largely just stripping out parts of an earlier (now apparently largely forgotten) paper/model and running it on Google scale compute and data (which the original researchers obviously couldn't afford).
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- incognito124 3mo agoI'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!
- aooao 3mo agoI 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.
- kristopolous 3mo agohe's answered this question a few times. It's basically "how was I supposed to have any idea what the implications were?" He said something like "16 bit, 32 bit, 48 bit addressing, it felt all equally improbable. Why would there ever be 65,000 computers on this network?"
- johannes1234321 3mo ago> "... Why would there ever be 65,000 computers on this network?" This thinking can be seen in the allocation of network blocks. Mercedes Benz getting 53.0.0.0/8 is just a "we have more addresses than we ever need." If somebody had imagined "yeah, let's give an address to each of our vehicles" they would have realized the space running out.
- fragmede 3mo agoThe computers of today are vastly more capable than the computers of the day when he came up with TCP/IP so if he were to have a second chance, knowing what he knows now, we'd have to calibrate it against the fact that computers in the 1970s simply weren't as capable as the beasts we have today.
- greyface- 3mo ago> if he'd had the chance to have a second go of it In a sense, he did. Take a look at RFC 4838.
- Sesse__ 3mo agoI was at a talk where he brought up exactly this (I also once did a talk alongside him, but that's a different story). He said there would be two changes: 1. It would have 128-bit addresses. 2. It would have end-to-end encryption (or was it authentication, I forget). IPv6 was supposed to fix both of these, with IPsec mandatory, but the latter demand sort of faded out into obscurity. We ended up basically solving encryption by pushing everything into TLS anyway, which I guess solved much of the same problems although at a very different layer.
- djtriptych 3mo agohah. 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.
- manuisin 3mo agowow, that was the golden age of Google.
- djtriptych 3mo agoI don't want to name him as he's decently well known, but I'm pretty sure my mentor monitored Vint's interview to make sure no one accidentally rejected him for a coding error or something.
- justin66 3mo agoI suspect the only thing at risk of being smeared by a more complete retelling of that story is Google’s interview process.
- driverdan 3mo agoThey made him write code as part of an interview?
- throw5 3mo agoNever underestimate the power of hubris.
- djtriptych 3mo agoI don't know if he actually did. Just know that my mentor was hand-holding the hiring process which basically prided itself on false negatives and still probably does.
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- nickdothutton 3mo agoWorked with some of his team when I was at MCI/Worldcom. We stand on the shoulders of giants.
- jibal 3mo agoI 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.
- treyd 3mo agoSounds like he was frustrated he lost and thought the program was a lot more clever than it was. :)
- jibal 3mo agoHe was disappointed in himself that he hadn't realized that the word recognition "algorithm" was just "every word starting with a-l" -- he had speculated that there was in fact some sort of linguistic algorithm to determine whether a word was valid, not just a built-in hemi-dictionary. And he was disappointed in me or the program or the nature of reality that the play algorithm was so simple and dumb ... but it was a slow machine with limited memory, and doing better is actually quite hard and I hadn't invested the time to do so.
- foobarian 3mo ago
- jamesbelchamber 3mo agoIP on everything :D
- bflesch 3mo ago[flagged]
- saalweachter 3mo agoN.b. that Cerf was mentioned in the Epstein Files in a list of scientists Epstein wanted to invite to an event. There is no evidence Cerf actually accepted any such invitation. Not everyone "in the files" is in the files. For instance, Rebecca Watson is "in the Epstein Files" because Lawrence Kraus and Richard Dawkins wrote to Epstein to complain about her.
- grosswait 3mo agoI thought we were all aware by now that being on an Epstein list doesn’t automatically mean anything?
- dwheeler 3mo agoShould be, but no.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- darkarmani 3mo agoDo you know something about this that no one else knows? How many innocent people do you think are mentioned in those millions of documents?
- p1dda 3mo agoHow many "father's of the Internet" are there exactly?
- My_Name 3mo agoYou have to wonder about the "Mother of the Internet" at this point...
- slim 3mo agoDoD
- wbl 3mo agoRadia Perlman is the name that jumps to mind for me, but there are a bunch of others.
- My_Name 3mo agoI was referring more to the internet having many fathers...
- fragmede 3mo agoOoh, several of those as well! Sibling comment mentions Radia Perlman. She invented Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) which prevents loops in wiring from taking down networks. (Plug an Ethernet cable into the same switch it comes out of.) This has saved everyone's bacon countless times. Elizabeth Feinler managed hostnames before there was DNS and helped establish several of the top level domains (TLD)s we use today. There's Karen Spärck Jones without whom, search engines wouldn't be what they are today. Judy Estrin helped with TCP/IP, Sally Floyd worked on congestion control algorithms, without which, the Internet would have gotten all choked up and never gotten off the ground. Susan Estrada helped commercialize the Internet, with her work on internet exchanges (IX), and Jean Armour Polly gets credit for coining the phrase "surfing the Internet." but should be better known for pioneering public Internet access and for her work with families and kids getting online. These women played a critical role in creating the Internet we have today.
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- CurbStomper 3mo ago[dead]
- jvanderbot 3mo agoI 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.
- ixaxaar 3mo agoApparently there's "more to come" and its not a complete retirement.
- justin66 3mo agoIt’s hard to imagine that guy sitting still.
- skeeter2020 3mo agotrue - my first reaction was this seems like a weird milestone, as people like Vint Cerf don't really retire and stop, just change how & where they contribute. This seems like a nothing story pushed by TC and Google PR, more than a real event.
- ixaxaar 3mo agoFor a moment there I read "TC" and was like "the candidate"?!?!
- nout 3mo agoWork induced brain damage... ;)
- munificent 3mo agoI mean, he's 83. No one's battery runs forever.
- atombender 3mo agoAnyone 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?
- bushbaba 3mo agoHe was hired to go to meetings and state “I’m vint cerf, I work at Google” then blab for 2 mins and introduce the actual speaker for a meeting/conference. Similar ish to an influencer
- IncreasePosts 3mo agoI loved being able to say "vint cerf, my coworker, invented the internet"
- skeeter2020 3mo agomaybe this is a good thing though, where someone with a huge, legitimate contribution and legacy gets to cash in on their status, vs. the typical influencer.
- malthaus 3mo agoi'd say having "invented" the internet is a bigger claim to have influenced people rather than looking good in a bikini. so fair game to cash in on that legacy.
- jvanderbot 3mo agoHe worked on a few X projects and had some free reign to push next gen ideas. Delay tolerant networking is the one I interacted with the most, as well as Google Loon, if you recall that.
- esafak 3mo agoWas DTN used in Loon? They are a natural fit.
- TAlborough 3mo agoThank you. May your peace continue.
- PaulHoule 3mo agoI 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 https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21810-it-is-difficult-to-get-a-man-to-understand-something https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21810-it-is-difficult-to-ge... [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.
- cindyllm 3mo ago[dead]
- hydrogenbon007 3mo agoI remember watching Lo and Behold by Werner Herzog and just going how dedicated the internet pioneers were working in their 70s and beyond. Legends https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5275828/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5275828/
- indigodaddy 3mo agoDidn't know about this doc, thank you.
- IncreasePosts 3mo agoVint cerf now vintage cerf
- mehulashah 3mo agoFor 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.
- mark_l_watson 3mo agoExactly right. I have only had one long conversation with him, but he was friendly and very interesting.
- everyone 3mo ago[flagged]
- cyclopeanutopia 3mo agoWhich ethics are you talking about?
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3mo agoI think it's a fair question It would be interesting to know what Cerf, Thompson, etc. saw in Google. Why was it more appealing than, for example, academia The ethics question might be something like: Is advertising really the highest and best use for a public computer network; does it justify using the network for data collection and mass surveillance
- mghackerlady 3mo agoI think, in many ways, google is the only real successor to the research labs (Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, etc.) of the 20th century. If they had somewhere else to go, I don't doubt they'd go there
- sealeck 3mo agoThere are few occupations in which a man can be more innocently employed than the pursuit of devising asynchronous network protocols?
- tombert 3mo agoSo, uh, are they hiring a replacement "Internet Evangelist"? I love the internet, I could evangelize!
- blamestross 3mo agoMy "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.
- peterhunt 3mo agoWhen 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.
- devilbunny 3mo agoI 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.
- user3939382 3mo agoKnow him in real life. Don’t meet your heroes.
- Hugsbox 3mo agoWhy not? Everybody else seems to have really nice things to say about meeting him
- user3939382 3mo agoIf anyone has a good reason to need to know they can email me.
- Hugsbox 3mo agoEmailed you because I'm quite curious
- bcjdjsndon 3mo agoWill we still be able to get ipv4 addresses?
- afpx 3mo agoI worked with him at CNRI. Seemed pretty dim and overrated. I think people keep him around for the DARPA connection.
- protocolture 3mo agoOh no. But who will write the poem if Vint Cerf is the one retiring?
- aksss 3mo agoHey, 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.
- deelowe 3mo agoHad 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.
- rsingel 3mo agoAl Gore and Vint Cerf were both inaugural inductees in the Internet Hall of Fame The Internet gets a hall of fame (yes including Al Gore) | CNN Business https://share.google/zmVES2oM7hINsW3mq https://share.google/zmVES2oM7hINsW3mq
- godzillabrennus 3mo agoVint 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.
- looopTools 3mo agoI 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.
- rsingel 3mo agoFor 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/ https://www.internethalloffame.org/tag/2012/ Click on a profile, scroll to the bottom and click the Wired link
- crazybonkersai 3mo agoI have always thought that The architect from The Matrix series looks like Vint Cerf. I wonder if Wachowskis had Vint in mind when casting
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- subsaharancoder 3mo agoHe 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.
- lasereyes136 3mo agoI 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.
- linzhangrun 3mo agoThings like this always make me feel how young the computer industry is, and how fast it has developed.