Painting of Vint Cerf

Flickr CC: thierry ehrmann

Vint Cerf invented the protocol that rules them all: TCP/IP. Most people have never heard of it. But it describes the fundamental architecture of the internet, and it made Wi-Fi, Ethernet, LANs, the World Wide Web, email, FTP, 3G/4G possible -- as well as all of the inventions built upon those inventions.

Cerf did that in 1973. For most of you, that's probably 20 years before you even knew what the internet was. That's why he's known as the father of the internet and earned himself a Presidential Medal of Freedom. Cerf didn't stop there -- he went on to co-found the Internet Society (ISOC) and served as president of  ICANN, the organisation, which operates the domain naming system.

So it was pretty much a given that Cerf would be inducted, as he was on Monday, into ISOC's internet Hall of Fame in its inaugural year.

Just a few days beforehand Cerf talked with about how the military brought the TCP/IP protocol into being, how he and his co-conspirators knew -- almost 40 years ago -- what they were unleashing on the world, the threats to the net today, and what he'd like to see next: a vision that includes internet packets raining down from the sky.

For those who'd like to know more about the internet's birth beyond this interview, Cerf recommended reading an essay from ISOC, written by Barry Leiner, entitled "Brief History of the Internet." So how did you come to be the author of the TCP/IP protocol?


We had a different idea and I can't claim any responsibility for having suggested using packet-switching. It was really three other people working independently who suggested that idea simultaneously in the 1960s. So by the time I got involved in all in this, I was a graduate student at UCLA. I was working with my colleague and very close friend Steve Crocker, who is now the chairman of ICANN, a position I held for about a year.

A part of our job was to figure out what the software should look like for computers connecting to each other through this Arpanet. It was very successful -- there was a big public demonstration in October, 1972 which was organised by Kahn. After the October demo was done, Bob went to ARPA and I went to Stanford.

So in early 1973, Bob appears in my lab at Stanford and says 'I have a problem.' He said we now have the Arpanet working and we are thinking, 'How do we use computers in command and control?"


At that point, the only experience we had was with fixed installations of the Arpanet. So he had already begun thinking about what he called open networking and believed you might optimise a radio network differently than a satellite network for ships at sea, which might be different from what you do with dedicated telephone lines.

So we had multiple networks, in his formulation, all of them packet-switched, but with different characteristics. Some were larger, some went faster, some had packets that got lost, some didn't. So the question is how can you make all the computers on each of those various networks think they are part of one common network -- despite all these variations and diversity.

That was the internet problem.

In September 1973, I presented a paper to a group that I chaired called the International Network Working Group. We refined the paper and published formally in May 1974 as a description of how the internet would work.


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