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Apparently there's "more to come" and its not a complete retirement.

Exactly right. I have only had one long conversation with him, but he was friendly and very interesting.

wow, that was the golden age of Google.

He was involved in the design, planning, and future-proofing one of the major redesigns of Google's data center fabric. Google, AFAIK still uses a derivative of the fabric today.

Disc: Former Googler, Cloud Networking.

He 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.

He 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

Launder Google’s reputation, I assume.

Didn't know about this doc, thank you.

I 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.

There’s a whole body of work in the form of public statements and documents from Vint Cerf on that topic. You could explore Google for hours…

https://spectrum.ieee.org/vint-cerf-mistakes

he'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?"

> if he'd had the chance to have a second go of it

In a sense, he did. Take a look at RFC 4838.

It would depend on whether the computers back then could handle that (along with all the crypto algorithms in their infancy) when A:\ and B:\ weren't even a thing.

The 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.

Now they have several Turing Award winners, and several Nobel Prize winners.

I may be biased since I interned at Google in 2013 and 2014, but Google in the 2000s and early 2010s felt downright magical as someone who wanted to pursue a career in systems software research. They made impressive technologies that still hold up today, like MapReduce, BigTable, and Spanner. They hired many legends of computer science and software engineering, such as Rob Pike and Jeff Dean.

I’m concerned about the power that Google and other Big Tech companies have, but from a technical point of view Google has a lot of impressive technologies, and from a workplace standpoint, it seemed idyllic back in the early 2010s, though I’ve heard the work culture has changed in the past decade, and I may have rose-colored glasses from only being an intern there, never a full-timer.

Google 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.

I believe it's what is called a joke. I'm with you, I don't like them either.

It's written down so no body language.

The video probably shows a wide smile whilst saying it.

Sounds like he was frustrated he lost and thought the program was a lot more clever than it was. :)

Exactly as many as the USA has founding fathers, give or take a few. Which is to say less than in the Fathers of Mercy.

Al Gore is definitely one of them!

You have to wonder about the "Mother of the Internet" at this point...

The two that are most widely recognized are Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, for TCP/IP, but that's just the start of it. There's JCR Licklider, who first imagined a global network of computers. There's Leonard Kleinrock, first ARPANET nod and packet-switching theory. Larry Roberts, who led development of ARPANET. Paul Baran independently invented packet switching. Donald Davies coined the term "packet" and also developed packet switching. Louis Pouzin also worked on TCP/IP. Jon Postel managed the IP standards and address assignments for decades. Ray Tomlinson invented email and the @ sign. Of course, we can't forget Tim Berneres-Lee, to whom we credit the invention of the web (HTTP, HTML, URLS, the first web browser and server).

So, eleven.

The Dream Machine is a history book by M. Mitchell Waldrop that tells the story of JCR Licklider.

Thanks! We’ve updated the title.

I'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/06848...

(Well actually I'm listening to it not reading, maybe that's why I can't keep track of the protagonists!)

Father of the web sure. But HTTP is not the Internet!

he the mother

I 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.

Lots of people continue working because they enjoy it and to keep busy.

Vint 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.

Of 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’

I 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