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12 de enero de 2003 |
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Coinventor de los protocolos TCP/IP. Origen: http://soe.stanford.edu/AR95-96/vint.html Idioma: Inglés.
It is a trip of similarly mixed emotions that Vint Cerf, in a professional sense, has been making every day for the past 23 years. Often called the "Father of the Internet" for his co-authoring of the software upon which the Internet now flourishes, Cerf has certainly had plenty to be proud of since he and Bob Kahn designed the system in 1973. After developing the Internet protocols as an assistant professor at Stanford, Cerf has remained one of the Internet¹s most vigorous and articulate champions-first as a diplomat in establishing TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) as the common language of networking, and more recently as a leader for the non-profit Internet Society and as a technical guru for a telecommunications company building the architecture for the Internet's next generation. Appropriately enough, it was a couple of car trips arranged by his own father that propelled Vint Cerf down this long road to the Internet. The first trip, to the Stanford campus in the late '50s, came at the invitation of one of his father's friends at SRI International. The eighth grader from the San Fernando Valley spent several days on campus and left with a promise to return. The second trip, four years later, allowed Cerf a long look at a huge tube-based defense computer system in Santa Monica. Watching another of his Dad's pals monitor early warning radars from Northern Canada helped set the computer hook. Cerf spent his remaining summer weekends feeding paper tape to a Bendix G-15 at UCLA. Once at Stanford, he enrolled in all the computer science classes he could find. "I was taken by the whole idea of being able to make a machine do whatever we wanted it to do," says Cerf, recalling his classes with Professors John Herriot and Gene Golub. This passion for computing grew and led Cerf, after graduation and two years at IBM, to UCLA for deeper grounding in computer science. It was during these PhD years in the late '60s and early '70s that packet switching and non-nodal design emerged as the new paradigm for linking computers. "The whole idea was to buy a few up-to-date machines and then allow other researchers and contractors to access them remotely," Cerf explains. "ARPA [the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency] just couldn't afford to pay for new computers every year." Early time-sharing networks proved not only cheaper but, lacking a fixed center, more militarily robust. With satellites added to the mix, ARPA planners speculated that packet-switched networks might even allow tanks and ships to stay in touch. The problem was finding a communications protocol capable of spanning dissimilar networks. It was precisely this problem that Cerf, then teaching at Stanford, and Bob Kahn from ARPA solved with TCP. Cerf left Stanford in 1976 to run ARPA's Internet program. The following year, with an enhanced version of TCP/IP, Cerf sponsored a successful test of a three-network link between a mobile van in the Bay Area, a satellite to London, and an ARPANET station at USC. After this breakthrough test and nonstop advocacy by Cerf, TCP/IP became the ARPANET standard in 1983. By the mid '90s, TCP/IP was in use worldwide. It had won the "Protocol Wars." The network of networks, the Internet, was on its way. Today, Cerf works at MCI Communications as Senior Vice President of Data Architecture. He is responsible for the design and development of an integrated network framework that will eventually offer a full package of data, information, voice, and video services to MCI customers. v "Our mission," says Cerf " is to make MCI into a company that generates at least half of its income from products or services that don't even exist today." Cerf has no problem visualizing such products. For starters, he sees digital networked communicators that are as ubiquitous as telephones today. He sees remote sensing units sprinkled throughout homes, widespread global positioning sensors, speech-recognizing appliances, and personal display technology in the form of lightweight reading glasses. v A science-fiction fan, Cerf conjures such images with ease. In fact, he is writing a book chapter about the Internet in the year 2047. A trip to his Web site at MCI reveals the same foresight-and playfulness. Here, for example, you'll find a "reverse time capsule from 2023," in which correspondents from the future discuss petabit fiber links and NanoConstructor Tool Kits. Through his Web site, his speaking engagements, his continued technical prowess, his ideas, tact, and humor, Vint Cerf is helping transform today's rough-edged adolescent into the dominant information medium of the 21st Century. He is, at heart, that rare individual capable of acting on the parental sense of responsibility that lingers long after the child has left the house. About one - two years after the first online demo of how "actually let the public come in and use the ARPANET, running applications all over the U.S ...." (Vinton Cerf) the NET became really busy especially "every Friday night" (Bob Bell) Around about 1973 - 1975 I maintained PDP 10 hardware at SRI. I remember hearing that there was an ARPANET "conference"
on the Star Trek game every Friday night. Star Trek was a text based game
where you used photon torpedos and phasers to blast Klingons.
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Vint Cerf and his youngest son, Bennett, recently climbed into
a car at their suburban Virginia home and drove across two time zones to deposit
the teenager at the doorstep of his new college. It was, as all fathers who have
performed the rite know, a trip full of loss, pride, hope...and strangely
undiminished responsibility.