Vint Cerf helped create the Internet on the back of an envelope

I had the pleasure of meeting Vint at a workshop at Caltech. He was crazy smart, jumped right in, took notes for our group, and wowed us with stories of the early days over dinner. He was working with delay tolerant routing and contact graph routing for Google Loon at the time, I believe.

As always, it's nice to see a funny, capable, and humble person on the other side of the legend.

Vint Cerf was turning 40 the year the internet was born. That's a reminder to us folks that some of your greatest accomplishments could be achieved post 40. Silicon Valley bias is towards 20 somethings changing the world. That was not the case with these deeply rooted technologies. Some of it takes time and experience with tons of R&D over multiple decades to get to the real working solution, often rebuilding the same thing over and over.

I loved reading about creating simple protocols that fit on a napkin in ,, Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet''.

I feel the same way of nostr right now as a decentralized alternative to Twitter. It's super simple and there's nothing to take away from the basic protocol:

https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/01.md

I think it's time to get back to developing these kind of simple protocols that incentivize a healthy competition between clients and servers (and maybe other participants).

If you want the visionary behind the Internet, it was J.C.R. Licklider. He envisioned an "Intergalactic Computer Network" in the early 1960s. He galvanized the effort to start it, but wasn't the one to execute on it. The one to kickstart the effort was Larry Roberts, Lick's successor at the ARPA Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO). It was Wesley Clark who suggested the use of a separate computer to do the packet switching for the network (as opposed to letting the host computer do it), the so called "Interface Message Processor", the equivalent of routers in today's Internet. In 1969 The ARPAnet was born with only two nodes, and from there started growing in the early 70s. The network protocol at the time was called NCP (Network Control Protocol), which handled both network layer and transport layer functionality. Vint Cerf and Bob Khan developed the "Transmission Control Program", which still did both layers, but later, towards the late 70s, revised it by separating the two into "Transmission Control Protocol" and "Internet Protocol", aka TCP/IP. The ARPAnet finally switched from NCP to TCP/IP on Jan 1, 1983, the so called birth of the Internet.

Vint is one of the gentlemen of our profession. It's really an honor to have met him.

We missed an opportunity when we didn’t call it “cerfing the net”

Also this could use some mentioning

  Instead of having a single "inventor", the Internet was developed by many 
  people over many years. The following are some Internet pioneers who
  contributed to its early and ongoing development. These include early
  theoretical foundations, specifying original protocols, and expansion beyond a
  research tool to wide deployment.[1]

  1.1 Claude Shannon
  1.2 Vannevar Bush
  1.3 J. C. R. Licklider
  1.4 Paul Baran
  1.5 Donald Davies
  1.6 Charles M. Herzfeld
  1.7 Bob Taylor
  1.8 Larry Roberts
  1.9 Leonard Kleinrock
  1.10 Bob Kahn
  1.11 Douglas Engelbart
  1.12 Elizabeth Feinler
  1.13 Louis Pouzin
  1.14 John Klensin
  1.15 Vint Cerf
  1.16 Yogen Dalal
  1.17 Peter Kirstein
  1.18 Steve Crocker
  1.19 Jon Postel
  1.20 Joyce K. Reynolds
  1.21 Danny Cohen
  1.22 David J. Farber
  1.23 Paul Mockapetris
  1.24 David Clark
  1.25 Susan Estrada
  1.26 Dave Mills
  1.27 Radia Perlman
  1.28 Dennis M. Jennings
  1.29 Steve Wolff
  1.30 Sally Floyd
  1.31 Van Jacobson
  1.32 Ted Nelson
  1.33 Tim Berners-Lee
  1.34 Robert Cailliau
  1.35 Nicola Pellow
  1.36 Mark P. McCahill
  1.37 Marc Andreessen
  1.38 Eric Bina

[1]

  List of Internet pioneers

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_pioneers

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