A Digital Dark Age

           February 15, 2015

I personally am scared about where computer technology is going.

Right now, I could call the current time period a “Digital Dark Age.” When hardware and software become obsolete, humans will have no record of the 21st Century. People in the future will not know about their past. Our life, our memories, our most cherished family photographs increasingly exist as bits of information - on our hard drives or in "the cloud". But as technology moves on, they risk being lost in the wake of an accelerating digital revolution.

An example of a concerning thing related to this is compatibility with older versions of programs. One such example is the development of the recently announced Apple Watch. The Apple Watch will only work on an iPhone 5 or higher. Eventually, Apple will likely make newer models of them that work only on a 6, or possibly even the newest model iPhone. This is pressuring people to buy new phones, which do not work as well due to Apple adding extra features to default apps such as Maps that are unnecessary. Yet, the development of the iPhone is also subpar. Newer versions of iPhones often have additional features that are either already obsolete or useless, or they remove helpful features. For example, if Apple ever dared to try and remove the headphone jack on a future iPhone, people would be stuck, either being forced to spend $150 on Bluetooth headphones, or get a lower quality experience without them.

I have an idea myself of preserving every disk drive and every piece of hardware as a server in the cloud. If this works, items could be stored in accessible servers for generations, and our ancestors could see documents from the past. The solution is to take an X-ray snapshot of the content and the application and the operating system together, with a description of the machine that it runs on, and preserve that for long periods of time. That digital snapshot can recreate the past in the future. But obviously, a company would have to do it. I would need a company that could be around for hundreds of years, and not many companies last that long. While it would take a lot of fundraising, it is necessary to keep our future ancestors aware of our past.

I am nervous about how humans will fix this problem. If you have an idea, please comment it on this post.

Vinton Cerf

Age 73

Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google

My Entrepreneur History

            Februrary 8, 2015

        Since I created the Internet, I have worked for many companies at Internet-related roles. I am going to share today all of the work at various companies that I have done from 1982 to the present day.

        I left DARPA in 1982 to become the Vice President of Digital Information Services at MCI Communication Corporation. In 1983, MCI launched MCI Mail, the world’s first commercial email service. Despite the fact that the graphics were clunky, this was still a huge leap in technology that is often undereappreciated. It was shut down nine months before Google's Gmail was availible. MCI Mail was decommissioned in 2003, most likely due to a fraud scandal that was the largest in American history at the time.

        In 1986, Bob Kahn and I cofounded the CNRI (Corporation for National Research Initiatives) and I was its Vice President. At the time, Kahn was the President. In 1991, Kahn and I left CNRI to cofound ISOC, the Internet Society, in 1992. I was President from 1992 to 1995, with Kahn as Vice President. During this time, ISOC worked in conjunction with the Network Startup Resource Center, or NSRC. This was meant to help developing and poor countries get Internet access. The ISOC also started DCWs, Developing Country Workshops, beginning in 1993. In the first one, from August 10-14, 1993, 126 people from 67 developing countries were taught how to connect to the Internet, and it is now done annually. From 1993 to 2001, 1300 people attended DCWs from 96 countries. This was the major accomplishment that ISOC had done before I stepped down in 1995.

        At that time, I rejoined MCI (known as Worldcom until 2003) as Senior Vice President from 1994 to 2005. In 2002, MCI was reported for $3.8 billion of fraud. This later jumped to $11 billion in fraud from booking “line costs” and inflating revenues with bogus accounting entries. At the time, this was the largest fraud scandal in American history. Due to this scandal, MCI declared bankruptcy and had to shut down MCI Mail in June 2003. I left MCI in October 2005, two months before Verizon officially bought MCI for $7.6 billion. Since MCI’s collapse, I have been Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google.

        Vinton Cerf

        Age 73

        Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google

My Creation

        February 1, 2015

        Hello! Welcome to Vint Cerf's blog. Before I tell you about how I co-invented the Internet, I would like to say welcome to those of you who are on this site for the first time. If you do not know who I am, I was a developer of the Internet’s predecessor, the ARPANET, and co-designed the Internet Protocols that are used today. I am currently a Vice President and the Chief Internet Evangelist at Google, a role I have served since 2005.

        I went to Stanford University in 1965 for my college education. In 1969, after continuing my interest in computers, I moved to the University of California, Los Angeles, where they were setting up one of the computers that would connect to the ARPANET. That was when I met my future coworker Bob Kahn, and together we helped test the ARPANET. It worked, when we successfully sent the message “Lo” from a computer at UCLA to another one at Stanford University in October 1969 (The computer broke when attemting to send “G.”). I did not invent the ARPANET, but rather, I worked with Leonard Kleinrock on it. From there, Kahn and I knew we could expand the ARPANET to something greater and more practical outside of the Defense Department.

        In 1972, Kahn left UCLA to join IPTO, the Information Processing Techniques Office, in Washington, DC. IPTO is part of a more important organization in the Pentagon known as DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The ARPANET was the Internet network of the Advanced Research Projects Agency, of which the word "Defense" was added later that year. Kahn worked until 1975 on expansion of the ARPANET to the United Kingdom and Norway and introduction of the Alohanet, PRNET (packet radio network), and SATNET (satellite network). His ultimate goal was to connect PRNET and SATNET to the ARPANET. However, there was a major difficulty, in that they were all incompatible with each other. This would require a new approach to networking, of which Kahn brought this problem up to me in the Spring of 1973.

       At this point, Kahn approached me with the idea that would eventually become the Internet, having Transfer Control Protocol. We formed a strong team, combining my ability to write host software with his knowledge of the problem of connecting dissimilar networks. At a seminar in June 1973, we invited networkers from around the world in the first reveal of the proposed system. On May 5, 1974, Kahn and I published A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication, a research paper on this topic. 

        There are two key elements that are required in order to reliably transmit digital information across different networks. The TCP, or Transmission Control Protocol, provides orderly and reliable transmission across networks. There are also gateways and routers between networks in this decentralized system. Small packets of broken-down information are passed from router to router until they find the one nearest the recipient, and when every packet arrives, only then is the information is loaded onto one’s device. Packets are also sent to a network address and then a host address. If you are more interested, feel free to read the "The Internet" tab on the header. The Internet was designed to make minimal demands, provide a smooth user experience, and to scale upwards. 
        I moved to Washington, DC, to work for IPTO, from 1976 until 1982. In 1978, I worked with DARPA workers Jon Postel and Danny Cohen to split TCP into a TCP host protocol and IP, or Internetworking Protocol. This vastly simplified the transfers between networks.

        That is a short history of my experience at DARPA and building the Internet’s Transfer Protocol. I hope that I kept this summary short, but informative.

        Vinton Cerf

        Age 73

        Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google