Last week, TechCrunch reported that Vint Cerf, the person many widely recognized as the “father of the internet”, is retiring.
Most of us navigate the digital world every day without giving a thought to its architecture. Cerf, alongside Bob Kahn, co-designed TCP/IP — the fundamental plumbing that allows disparate computer networks to talk to one another. Computing’s highest honor, the Turing Award, sits on his shelf. So does the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Nearly everything we do online rests on protocols he helped pioneer in the 1970s. For the past twenty years, he has carried that legacy forward under a fitting title: Google’s chief internet evangelist.
Reading the news took me down memory lane. Over the course of my career, I’ve had the rare privilege of helping amplify Vint’s insight at two very different moments in the internet’s evolution.
The first was exactly 26 years ago this month, in June 2000, I placed an op-ed co-authored by Vint and IBM’s internet guru, John Patrick, in The Financial Times.
Fast-forward 21 years to June 2021. This time, I interviewed Vint alongside Linode founder Christopher Aker for a piece in The New Stack about the past and future of cloud infrastructure. When I asked them what they would do differently if they could start all over again, both gave the exact same answer without a second of hesitation: they would build IPv6 first, instead of IPv4.
As Vint enters a well-earned retirement, his impact leaves a permanent mark on human history. I’ll always be grateful to have played even a nanosecond’s part in helping share that story.
Congratulations on the retirement, Vint. The internet — and everyone who’s had the chance to learn from you — is better off for the work.
(Feature image by Duncan.Hull – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=87566012)
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