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:
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.
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
Well, they said success has many fathers for a reason.
Very strange that the the list of the Internet pioneers from the Wikipedia that you've posted does not include Robert Metcalf but the article does mentioned him, but seriously why he is not in the Top 10 is beyond me! Robert is the original inventor of Ethernet he also also founded a highly successful 3Com company providing Internet infrastructure in the early days of the Internet [1],[2].
Based on the OP article we should have the original picture of the back of the envelope drawing by Cerf but nothing to be seen because according to him he threw it away. Robert, however have drawing picture of the Ethernet's original design in its glorified envelope with infamous vampire clamps/taps on it [3],[4].
> 1988: NSF sponsors a series of workshops at Harvard on the commercialization and privatization of the Internet.
> 1988: Kahn et al. write a paper "Towards a National Research Network." According to the Brief History, "This report was influential on then Senator Al Gore, and ushered in high speed networks that laid the networking foundation for the future information superhighway."
Gore was making speeches on the senate floor. In 1986, he said in a speech that is on the congressional record:
> America's highways transport people and materials across the country. Federal freeways connect with state highways which connect in turn with county roads and city streets. To transport data and ideas, we will need a telecommunications highway connecting users coast to coast, state to state, city to city. The study required in this amendment will identify the problems and opportunities the nation will face in establishing that highway.
Somewhere I have a photocopy of a letter from Al Gore thanking the team at NCSA for their work, particularly on the projects that got funding via the NSF, which Al considered himself to be instrumental in allocating, and which paid Bina's and Andreesen's (and a whole bunch of other people's) salaries.
If memory serves they also picked up some of the funding for NCSA Telnet, which for many people, in particular Mac and DOS users, was the Telnet program they used for more than a decade.
It's just a fun thing, I don't know how history would affect it unless there was evidence he never said "I took the initiative in creating the Internet" which he did.
Snopes has a very complete fact check here (regardless of political concerns you may have about it overall, this article particularly has good factual search): https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/internet-of-lies/
There’s a bunch of important contextual quotes:
> If, for example, Dwight Eisenhower had said in the mid-1960s that he, while president, "took the initiative in creating the Interstate Highway System," he would not have been the subject of dozens and dozens of editorials lampooning him for claiming he "invented" the concept of highways or implying that he personally went out and dug ditches across the country to help build the roadway. Everyone would have understood that Eisenhower meant he was a driving force behind the legislation that created the highway system, and this was the very same concept Al Gore was expressing about himself with interview remarks about the Internet.
> Last year the Vice President made a straightforward statement on his role. He said: "During my service in the United States Congress I took the initiative in creating the Internet." We don't think, as some people have argued, that Gore intended to claim he "invented" the Internet. Moreover, there is no question in our minds that while serving as Senator, Gore's initiatives had a significant and beneficial effect on the still-evolving Internet. The fact of the matter is that Gore was talking about and promoting the Internet long before most people were listening. We feel it is timely to offer our perspective.
It’s can be a funny joke, but, given its role in the presidential election and the possibility that is swung it to GWB, it’s important to make sure one is making that joke with the full understanding that it was actually taken wholly out of context which it sounds like you’re disagreeing with. If Vint Cerf (the guy this article is about) is out there saying “yup what Al Gore said is 100% accurate”, wouldn’t that cause you to take a second look (seriously - that snopes article has a lot of detail. Highly recommended reading if you’re unfamiliar with the context).
Having an organizing or foundational role in ensuring funding gives you a pretty strong claim. It’s like Sergei Brin saying he invented Google. Probably about 0% of his original lines of code still exist. Would you laugh at Steve Jobs if he claimed he invented the iPhone even though he didn’t do participate in inventing any of the actual innovation that would make it what it was like capacitive touch control and multitouch gestures? Would Lincoln be out of place for saying he won the Civil War even though he personally was a civilian and personally hasn’t fought or killed anyone and wasn’t a general? Would Truman be out of place in claiming he was a key piece in the creation of the atomic bombs considering he took the Einstein-Szilard letter to heart and set the governmental wheels in motion that led to the formation of the Manhattan project?
No. To my joke, it literally doesn’t even matter whether Al Gore did or didn’t have anything to do with the Internet. The joke is that it’s funny to put a politician in with all the engineers and scientists, and also that Al Gore has an amusing name. Completely disconnected from facts at all, really. I don’t know what this has to do with an election tbh.
I have a feeling you don't find Eisenhower being mentioned as one of the creators of the interstate highway system as funny. Politicians have huge leverage when they choose to pursue an idea relentlessly.
The shot at Gore feels cheap only because that (bombastic sounding) "joke" was amplified to ridiculous extremes during a very divisive election, to the extent that his enormous contributions have been nullified. I'm tired of lies.
> > If, for example, Dwight Eisenhower had said in the mid-1960s that he, while president, "took the initiative in creating the Interstate Highway System," he would not have been the subject of dozens and dozens of editorials lampooning him for claiming he "invented" the concept of highways or implying that he personally went out and dug ditches across the country to help build the roadway.
But Gore didn't say "the National Research Network", he said "the Internet". So a closer analogy would be if Dwight Eisenhower had said "I took the initiative in creating highways". It's sort of true, but it's also a outsized, boastful claim.
Happy to have a discussion, but you have to use facts. His role is not limited to NREN and he was pivotal not just in ARPANET (a far more direct precursor to the internet I think you’d agree), but also in making sure it became the Internet by talking about and pushing for legislation making commerce on it possible.
> Wolf Blitzer (who conducted the original 1999 interview) stated in 2008 that: “… because it was distorted to a certain degree and people said they took what he said, which was a carefully phrased comment about taking the initiative in creating the Internet to—I invented the Internet. And that was the sort of shorthand, the way his enemies projected it”
> In the 1980s and 1990s, he promoted legislation that funded an expansion of the ARPANET, allowing greater public access, and helping to develop the Internet.
> Cerf would also later state “… Al was attuned to the power of networking much more than any of his elective colleagues. His initiatives led directly to the commercialization of the Internet”
> In a speech to the American Political Science Association, former Republican Speaker of the United States House of Representatives Newt Gingrich also stated: "In all fairness, it's something Gore had worked on a long time. Gore is not the Father of the Internet, but in all fairness, Gore is the person who, in the Congress, most systematically worked to make sure that we got to an Internet, and the truth is—and I worked with him starting in 1978 when I got [to Congress], we were both part of a "futures group"—the fact is, in the Clinton administration, the world we had talked about in the '80s began to actually happen."
It's a bit much to accuse others of not using facts when you're trying to obscure and confuse something that's ultimately pretty simple. A claim about "the Internet" is a claim about the Internet. A claim to have "took the initiative in creating" a thing is going beyond a claim to have made a significant positive contribution, even an essential one, to that thing.
The internet wasn’t invented by any single person nor did it come into some single state all at once. There was a bunch of parallel research lines that feed into one another.
Specifically the Internet we all know and love today was enabled solely by legislation that allowed commercialization of networks that had been developed by the government and only for the government (ie ARPANET which had really come out of a way to try to maintain communications up in the face of a nuclear attack). If there’s one group of humans that created the internet, I’d say it’s the politicians that allowed it to come into being and set the very early path before it had accumulated so much scale that it became a separate uncontrollable entity. All the technical developments were super important and there were many good ideas but technical ideas were largely funded by research grants from governments here and we know that technical solutions will come about regardless of details when there’s a business need. TCP/IP is remarkably simple as a concept and even the initial implementation isn’t thaaat complicated and it kept getting refined many times over - techies were passionate about networking and were never going to let it drop from a technical failure level. There are scaling challenges that hit in various points but those will always be overcome somehow through market competition (fairly inevitable once there’s enough independent researchers). Ethernet is far more complicated but we had Internet before that was even a thing.
> A claim about "the Internet" is a claim about the Internet. A claim to have "took the initiative in creating" a thing is going beyond a claim to have made a significant positive contribution, even an essential one, to that thing.
I think you’re intentionally missing the quote in context. Here’s the relevant quote:
> During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system."
The one sentence you are saying is him lying reads very much like a throwaway that he expands upon immediately to explain what he means by that. It’s a live interview - you have to be intentionally trying to misrepresent what’s actually said, and ignoring the context of all the engineers working on the project supporting with “yup - Al Gore is 100% accurate and no other politician met with us regularly and fought to get us funding and without him I’m not sure the internet would have happened”. Now maybe they’re overstating a bit since Gingrich and other republicans also saw the value here and helped with bipartisan work in the 90s. But if I recall correctly he was pushing for funding for projects critical to the internet in the 80s and then pushing for commercialization in the 90s.
So, to me his quote in context certainly doesn’t read like he’s claiming sole credit for invention of the internet. It reads more like “I was a critical member of the political body that allows the internet to happen”. Is this interpretation agreeable to you? If yes, is it true or false? If no to either question, please elaborate why in-context the quote is a problem and/or how he’s taking undue credit beyond regurgitating one sentence in a broader discussion that includes a clarification on what he’s meaning.
The internet started in the 50s. We can assume Al Gore knows this because of how (largely uniquely for politicians) passionate he was about this (basically a political fan boi who understood the practical applications and the value of one’s he couldn’t even imagine yet). So why would we choose the most uncharitable interpretation of one line that clearly doesn’t seem to be meant that way in context? Especially when that uncharitable interpretation requires us negating the intelligence and forward looking of a man that clearly had that quality (note how politically ahead of his time he was on climate change too). These aren’t hard issues to be on the right side of. They are significantly more rare in the political class though and probably one of the reasons he lost. Can’t have a competent president that understands long term decision making. We might start expecting that be the norm.
