Vint Cerf in Bangalore

If you are reading this blog, then you ought to owe your allegiance to Vint Cerf.

Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn are the creators of TCP/IP, the backbone protocol of the Internet. Quite commonly referred to as one of the "Founding Fathers of Internet", Vint is currently a Vice President and the Chief Internet Evangelist at Google. He and Bob Kahn jointly received the ACM Turing award in 2004.

Vint was in Bangalore recently, and Google had arranged for a talk by him as part of its Speaker Series program in Bangalore. I was lucky to attend Vint's talk on the future of Internet. I must say he looked quite jovial and energetic, considering he is in his sixties.

Vint started the talk with a peek into the history of Internet and how TCP/IP came into existence. In one of his slides, he had a photo of himself, wearing a T-shirt with the caption "I P on everything". On Googling more, I just found out that his T-shirt had caused quite some stir at an IETF conference in 1992. And why not!!! IP was going to become a world standard.

During his talk, Vint gave plenty of examples how Internet is making its presence felt in every walk of modern human life. He also hinted at a couple of unsolved questions plaguing computer science and networking; and urged the "mix of academia and engineers" audience to ponder over such issues and contribute, in order to take technology a step further. Towards the end of the talk, he talked about one of the projects he is working on currently - the "InterPlanetary Internet Project" in progress at Jet Propulsion Lab, which aims at designing a network pervading our solar system in order to facilitate high speed and quantity of data transfer between remote space exploration stations, rovers and base stations on earth. (Please note that this project is not a Google project.)

At the end, there was a Q&A session, where the audience poured over their questions on Vint regarding a variety of topics, ranging right from ways to bridge the digital divide in India, to why Vint decided to join Google. The session ended with a standing ovation to Vint, and with one particularly interesting comment/question from someone in the audience : "Did the term 'surfing', by any chance, originate from 'Cerf'? I'm a child of the Internet; Thanks GrandDad!!!" :)

When I came out of the auditorium, I was thanking and admiring Vint and others for their pioneering work, without which my blog would be just a personal diary in my desk drawer.

PS : For a history of ARPANET, the predecessor of the Internet, read this; and you will be aware of many stalwarts who contributed to the birth of the Internet.
Read this for a detailed account from Vint on the birth of the Internet.