Fathers of the Internet
Vint Cerf is one of two people considered the “Fathers of the Internet,” the other person being Robert (Bob) Kahn. These two worked together in the 1970s on the TCP/IP protocols (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol), i.e., the suite of communication protocols used to interconnect network devices on the Internet.
Big Data and Social Media
Cerf flew all the way from California to give a talk at CERN on “Big Data and Social Media on the Internet,” in the same lecture hall where the Higgs boson discovery was announced. An email was sent the day before letting people know about the talk, and I jumped at the chance to attend. I showed up early with another intern and we were able to get almost front-row seats, which was beyond lucky since by the time the talk started, the whole place was full.
While I feel the title of the talk was a bit of a misnomer—it was more a “History of ARPANET” than about social media—I still enjoyed the talk immensely since Cerf is a wonderful public speaker. You can watch the entire talk for yourself here, or you can read my summary below. Full house! |
When computers first started spreading their wings, those wings took up a lot of space. While nowadays we can process 3.36 billion instructions per second on a hand-size iPhone 6, that is a 120,000,000 faster than the car-size computers used to launch the Apollo mission. And while the iPhone 6 will cost at most $500 if you buy the Plus version with the most memory, a single Apollo computer would cost $3.5 million. As such, a single organization in the 1960s faced both monetary and physical space capacity challenges of owning a bunch of computers themselves. This leads to the question that if a single company cannot own all they need, could they somehow network with other groups to collectively increase their processing power?
The earliest ideas for a computer network that would allow general communications among computer users was formulated in April 1963 by computer scientist J. C. R. Licklider. In October of that year, Licklider went to work for the U.S. Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). He left the agency before any computer networking projects began but not before he planted the seed of the idea in some of the agency’s leaders. Vint Cerf gives his talk at CERN |
DARPA began working on the packet-switching networking possibility with their project ARPANET, which attempted to network computers together across four sites: the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB), Stanford, and the University of Utah. The idea of packet-switching was viewed as an impossibility at the time, so few computer science companies bid to work on the project. DARPA ultimately partnered with BBN Technologies, which consisted of an initial seven-person team that included Kahn. | The four sites that hosted the first computer networking activities were located on the west side of the United States. Image courtesy BBN/DARPA. |
Surprises
During Cerf’s talk, he listed some surprises that occurred along the way of Internet development. One surprise is that while the first commercial email service, MCI Mail, did not launch until 1983, the ARPANET was using email as early as 1971. People originally believed that the creation of email would cause travel budgets to go down now that correspondence could take place remotely over different geographical and time-zone areas. Instead, travel budgets actually increased! Email let groups form larger collaborations, meaning more people needed to travel whenever in-person conferences were required.
The first “spam” happened in 1978. Since ARPANET was government-sponsored and research focused, certain forms of emails were discouraged or prohibited:
-1982 handbook on computing at MIT's AI Lab
Following his talk, Cerf stayed around afterward to answer questions, give autographs, and pose for photos. Even though the line was long, I knew I would probably never have this opportunity again, so I waited until it was my turn to snap a photo with the Internet legend. 😊 I’ll post again as soon as I can to tell you about the next big thing that happened: an international science communication conference! |