I met Vint at the Kech Institute for Space Studies. He arrived to help us look at in-space data centers for planetary science throughout the solar system. He was a big proponent of delay-tolerant networking and other useful networking stacks, so he was the "rep" for that layer of problems.

Just the nicest guy you could imagine. He took the note-takers job during our breakouts, had beers with us after the session, and asked really good questions and never asserted anything the whole time.

What a legend.

• ixaxaar

  today at 11:32 AM

  Apparently there's "more to come" and its not a complete retirement.

  • skeeter2020

    today at 3:07 PM

    true - my first reaction was this seems like a weird milestone, as people like Vint Cerf don't really retire and stop, just change how & where they contribute. This seems like a nothing story pushed by TC and Google PR, more than a real event.

    • ixaxaar

      today at 4:41 PM

      For a moment there I read "TC" and was like "the candidate"?!?!

    • munificent

      today at 5:18 PM

      I mean, he's 83. No one's battery runs forever.

      • lrem

        today at 5:52 PM

        In his recent goodbye meeting he very much gave off a "I will die at my desk" kind of energy. Quite unstoppable.

  • justin66

    today at 12:16 PM

    It’s hard to imagine that guy sitting still.

For all the naysayers in this thread, I gotta say you’re wrong. Vint is a class act. Humble, helpful, and optimistic. Not to mention one of the most impactful computer scientists of our generation.

• mark_l_watson

  today at 3:37 PM

  Exactly right. I have only had one long conversation with him, but he was friendly and very interesting.

• everyone

  today at 3:46 PM

  [flagged]

  • sealeck

    today at 3:58 PM

    There are few occupations in which a man can be more innocently employed than the pursuit of devising asynchronous network protocols?

  • cyclopeanutopia

    today at 3:56 PM

    Which ethics are you talking about?

I interviewed him a few times, when I was a tech journalist in the 90s - a very impressive man.

However I never forget my surprise, Idly flicking through TV one evening and coming across Earth Final Conflict - and there was Vint in a fairly substantial role

hah. I was an intern at Google in 2005 when he was hired and remember the wave of reverence that went through Mountain View. Salute to a legend!

It’s like two lifetimes in tech years. I remember that summer Google Earth was launched, we were a year removed from the Gmail launch, and I worked on shipping the first Summer of Code.

• jrockway

  today at 5:26 PM

  I worked on GFiber in the mid 2010s. We were having a debate about IPv6 support, which many people wanted to not do. I wrote a far-too-long essay on why it was important (at the time) and Vint picked it up to yell at the leadership team to get it prioritized. It was truly an "only at Google" experience to have someone who essentially invented the Internet reading your posts and acting on them.

  (I guess a decade later, was IPv6 important? Still not sure about that one. But it seemed important at the time.)

• manuisin

  today at 10:16 AM

  wow, that was the golden age of Google.

  • djtriptych

    today at 12:37 PM

    I don't want to name him as he's decently well known, but I'm pretty sure my mentor monitored Vint's interview to make sure no one accidentally rejected him for a coding error or something.

    • justin66

      today at 1:08 PM

      I suspect the only thing at risk of being smeared by a more complete retelling of that story is Google’s interview process.

    • driverdan

      today at 1:07 PM

      They made him write code as part of an interview?

      • djtriptych

        today at 4:45 PM

        I don't know if he actually did.

        Just know that my mentor was hand-holding the hiring process which basically prided itself on false negatives and still probably does.

      • throw5

        today at 2:54 PM

        Never underestimate the power of hubris.

    • sriram_malhar

      today at 3:22 PM

      Vint had an interview?!! Who had the gall to suggest he needs to come in and be evaluated?

      • djtriptych

        today at 4:42 PM

        I don't remember the exact details after 20 yrs but I think EVERYONE got a coding loop no exceptions at the time by default.

        And they were still in the era where's they'd just keep interviewing you until they "got enough signal" so people would be back 3 and 4 times.

Anyone know what he actually did at Google? Was it an active role, did he publish anything interesting? Or was it more of an Institute for Advanced Study kind of position?

• qmarchi

  today at 3:23 PM

  He was involved in the design, planning, and future-proofing one of the major redesigns of Google's data center fabric. Google, AFAIK still uses a derivative of the fabric today.

  Disc: Former Googler, Cloud Networking.

• jvanderbot

  today at 1:32 PM

  He worked on a few X projects and had some free reign to push next gen ideas. Delay tolerant networking is the one I interacted with the most, as well as Google Loon, if you recall that.

  • esafak

    today at 2:57 PM

    Was DTN used in Loon? They are a natural fit.

• bushbaba

  today at 1:29 PM

  He was hired to go to meetings and state “I’m vint cerf, I work at Google” then blab for 2 mins and introduce the actual speaker for a meeting/conference.

  Similar ish to an influencer

  • skeeter2020

    today at 3:09 PM

    maybe this is a good thing though, where someone with a huge, legitimate contribution and legacy gets to cash in on their status, vs. the typical influencer.

  • IncreasePosts

    today at 2:22 PM

    I loved being able to say "vint cerf, my coworker, invented the internet"

• acheron

  today at 2:49 PM

  Launder Google’s reputation, I assume.

  • today at 4:40 PM

I remember watching Lo and Behold by Werner Herzog and just going how dedicated the internet pioneers were working in their 70s and beyond.

Legends

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5275828/

• indigodaddy

  today at 1:07 PM

  Didn't know about this doc, thank you.

I wonder if he would have designed TCP/IP differently if he'd had the chance to have a second go of it.

Maybe having multiple streams within a single connection, like QUIC does, would have been a better choice. Also being able to demarcate message boundaries within the protocol itself, perhaps, instead of it being a simple byte stream.

• Sesse__

  today at 10:19 AM

  I was at a talk where he brought up exactly this (I also once did a talk alongside him, but that's a different story). He said there would be two changes:

  1. It would have 128-bit addresses. 2. It would have end-to-end encryption (or was it authentication, I forget).

  IPv6 was supposed to fix both of these, with IPsec mandatory, but the latter demand sort of faded out into obscurity. We ended up basically solving encryption by pushing everything into TLS anyway, which I guess solved much of the same problems although at a very different layer.

  • throw0101a

    today at 2:03 PM

    > We ended up basically solving encryption by pushing everything into TLS anyway, which I guess solved much of the same problems although at a very different layer.

    The "solving" of encryption with TLS should not be celebrated.

    Everything needs to go over TLS/HTTP-443 because of middleware boxes basically blocking everything else by default in many cases, and so application/protocol designs have to shoehorn / kludge everything into a round hole even if it's a square peg.

    Certainly I'd want everything to have encryption at the higher layers (OSI 5-7), but having opportunistic encryption at IP (OSI 3) would also be great because snoopers could tell that two nodes are communicating but not how / what: RTSP? Torrent? Mindcraft? PvP2 game? If every node could (say) do an IKEv2 negotiation with every other node have IP-level traffic wrapped in IPsec that would help with traffic analysis.

  • hyperman1

    today at 10:44 AM

    Doing this brings you close to OSI, which famously failed by being overcomplicated. The current design was implementable by zillions of cheap humans running cheap hardware.

    I always wonder if the internet is thesurvivor of the networking cambrian explosion, with a slight roll of the dice making another candidate the winner.

    • Sesse__

      today at 12:08 PM

      > The current design was implementable by zillions of cheap humans running cheap hardware.

      Yes and no. The current internet arguably does not work without a browser and a TLS stack anyway, neither of which is easily implementable (e.g. number of practically usable rendering engines is in the single digits). I mean, I can piece together an IP packet, too, but there's not that many usable services reachable that way.

    • cobbzilla

      today at 11:30 AM

      You’re definitely right — the tech stack travels through time along what’s called a “path dependent” trajectory.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_dependence

    • dboreham

      today at 12:47 PM

      As someone who was there at the time, OSI certainly didn't fail by being "overcomplicated". It failed because a) they charged money to read the standards documents and b) TCP/IP already had so much deployment momentum that nothing was going to supplant it (we see proof of this in the fact that IPv6 also didn't achieve that). Edit: also c) there was no requirement (unlike RFCs) to have an interoperable reference implementation available. So the implementations that were created mostly didn't interoperate.

      • ayewo

        today at 1:38 PM

        In your opinion, do you think Internet Protocol Version 8 (IPv8) [1] stands a chance to fix the mistakes of IPv6 after more than 20 years now?

        Or there is too much inertia for IPv8 to overcome to become a truly backwards compatible extension / superset of IPv4?

        Part of the reasons for the slow adoption of IPv6 was that it was never designed to be backwards compatible unlike IPv8.

        1: https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-thain-ipv8-00.html

        • treyd

          today at 3:20 PM

          This IPv8 document is not a serious proposal. The entire family of documents was published by a single person without collaboration from anyone else at IETF, and there has not been any work to integrate feedback from other IERF contributors (last I was aware of).

          Anyone can publish an IETF draft document, it doesn't mean it's a serious proposal under consideration or will ever actually be implemented.

        • throw0101a

          today at 2:06 PM

          > In your opinion, do you think Internet Protocol Version 8 (IPv8) [1] stands a chance to fix the mistakes of IPv6 after more than 20 years now?

          IPv8 solves precisely zero of the problems that is causing a 'slow' roll out of IPv6 / replacement of IPv4:

          """

          So it's a matter of mathematical and physical fact that to expand the address size, you must change the protocol, and that means two things immediately:

          You have to change the version number.

          You have to add new code to handle the new version.

          Furthermore, you don't want to split the Internet in two, so you must design a method of interworking between the old version and the new version. Annoyingly, you need to do that in a way that can be done completely in machines that know about the new version, because other machines don't know anything at all about the new version, by definition. So,

          You need a coexistence technique so that updated systems, with the new protocol, can connect to old systems that know nothing of the new protocol. Two minutes of thought show that this third requirement has only two solutions:

          (3A) Dual stack, in which the new machines speak both the old (IPv4) and new (IPng) protocol.

          (3B) Translation, in which something translates addresses between the old and new protocols.

          […]

          Incidentally, "IPv8" proponents often ask why IPv6 didn't simply stick some extra bits on the front of IPv4 addresses, instead of inventing a whole new format. Actually, we tried that: the "IPv4-Compatible IPv6 address" format was defined in [RFC3513] but deprecated by [RFC4291] because it turned out to be of no practical use for coexistence or transition. The related "IPv4-Mapped IPv6 address" format is still valid and has a role in the POSIX socket API. Mappings of this kind also figured in the moderately successful coexistence technologies known as 6to4 [RFC3056, RFC3068] and Teredo [RFC4380], which have now been overtaken by events.

          """

          * https://github.com/becarpenter/book6/blob/main/01.%20Introdu...

          * Interview with author of article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3jkZ1Ulz-s

          • Sesse__

            today at 4:13 PM

            > Actually, we tried that

            I'm always fascinated by how many people think IPv6 adoption would have gone lightning-fast if we just used This One Weird Trick, where said trick has actually been tried and didn't help. They usually refuse to back down even after you tell them so.

• justin66

  today at 1:09 PM

  There’s a whole body of work in the form of public statements and documents from Vint Cerf on that topic. You could explore Google for hours…

  https://spectrum.ieee.org/vint-cerf-mistakes

• kristopolous

  today at 9:13 AM

  he's answered this question a few times. It's basically "how was I supposed to have any idea what the implications were?" He said something like "16 bit, 32 bit, 48 bit addressing, it felt all equally improbable. Why would there ever be 65,000 computers on this network?"

  • johannes1234321

    today at 1:31 PM

    > "... Why would there ever be 65,000 computers on this network?"

    This thinking can be seen in the allocation of network blocks. Mercedes Benz getting 53.0.0.0/8 is just a "we have more addresses than we ever need."

    If somebody had imagined "yeah, let's give an address to each of our vehicles" they would have realized the space running out.

• greyface-

  today at 9:41 AM

  > if he'd had the chance to have a second go of it

  In a sense, he did. Take a look at RFC 4838.

• alienchow

  today at 12:57 PM

  It would depend on whether the computers back then could handle that (along with all the crypto algorithms in their infancy) when A:\ and B:\ weren't even a thing.

  • crackez

    today at 3:04 PM

    Not like CP/CMS predates the Internet or anything... /s

• fragmede

  today at 9:18 AM

  The computers of today are vastly more capable than the computers of the day when he came up with TCP/IP so if he were to have a second chance, knowing what he knows now, we'd have to calibrate it against the fact that computers in the 1970s simply weren't as capable as the beasts we have today.

Worked with some of his team when I was at MCI/Worldcom. We stand on the shoulders of giants.

I still remember back in 2005 when I just joined a company, a coworker was quipping Google is not a real elite company, because it doesn't even have a Turing Award winner. I showed him the news that Vint Cerf joined Google recently.

• FartyMcFarter

  today at 11:06 AM

  Now they have several Turing Award winners, and several Nobel Prize winners.

  • mahouk

    today at 2:03 PM

    I wonder if the transformer inventors will ever get a Turing (honestly proving to be one of the most transformative - no pun intended - technologies of the millennium so far). I know pretty much all of them left Google but they'd still be counted as alumni.

A genuine innovator

No matter what you think of Google

• linguae

  today at 10:09 AM

  I may be biased since I interned at Google in 2013 and 2014, but Google in the 2000s and early 2010s felt downright magical as someone who wanted to pursue a career in systems software research. They made impressive technologies that still hold up today, like MapReduce, BigTable, and Spanner. They hired many legends of computer science and software engineering, such as Rob Pike and Jeff Dean.

  I’m concerned about the power that Google and other Big Tech companies have, but from a technical point of view Google has a lot of impressive technologies, and from a workplace standpoint, it seemed idyllic back in the early 2010s, though I’ve heard the work culture has changed in the past decade, and I may have rose-colored glasses from only being an intern there, never a full-timer.

  • kaladin-jasnah

    today at 1:12 PM

    > who wanted to pursue a career in systems software research

    I interacted with many professors in OS research and other adjacent systems fields when touring grad schools and I heard or saw that some were extremely toxic or intense compared to other fields I saw. With OS at least, big tech companies seem to hold a lot of influence over research directions (eg. so much of it is specifically for AI datacenters, or for one company's AI datacenter problems), and I asked OS professors about this and got disheartened replies that there was nothing they could do because of the incentives in the field. I was quite disillusioned. I know that AI being a hot new topic makes leaves more stones unturned and might lead to more publishability, but it's still depressing.

    • linguae

      today at 2:16 PM

      I’m out of the loop these days in systems research since I largely focus on programming languages and AI these days (though I still love systems) and I treat research more as a side hobby rather than a full-fledged career. It’s disappointing to hear about toxic systems labs. There’s also the “funding-or-perish” and “publish-or-perish” pressures of academia. This is one of the reasons why I teach at a community college, where 8 months of the year I focus on teaching, leaving me 4 months of break per year where I could do research without having to worry about my tenure chances or about funding, though it would be nice to be able to pay some students to help with research projects, and it would also be nice to have the funds to buy expensive equipment such as GPUs with large amounts of RAM.

      • kaladin-jasnah

        today at 3:18 PM

        That seems like a great setup, and maybe something I'll think about after grad school (or maybe look into being a professor at LACs or less research oriented schools)! I'm already sort of nervous about doing the PhD because of the insane toxicity I've encountered and the pressure to do research in direct support of industry (which is probably exacerbated by NSF funding being impossible to get), but hopefully I'll find things to enjoy about it. The career prospects also seem tenuous, as a lot of outcomes seem to be "go through a brutal tenure process" or work for FAANG/adjacent (probably not even in research since places like MSR are difficult to get). But I would like the creative freedom a professorship might offer.

• echelon

  today at 9:12 AM

  Google can't tarnish Vint Cerf.

  There are lots of brilliant people at Google who do no evil.

  The fact that the company makes evil decisions about the direction of the web, privacy, and performs blatantly monopolistic actions does not outweigh the good things people at Google have done. At least not yet.

  You can hate the company but love the brilliant work the engineers have done. The same can be said of lots of companies: Apple, Anthropic, ...

  Meta, on the other hand, I'm not so sure about. It's less of an overt monopoly, but some of its actions are heinously amoral.

  • today at 12:06 PM

  • ChrisMarshallNY

    today at 9:44 AM

    Wasn’t the first time, for him, but he has managed to keep his name in the clear.

    He worked for MCI/Worldcomm, before Google. Bernie Ebbers went to jail, for that.

    Ahh… the good ol’ days, when we actually jailed scumbag billionaires, instead of voting massive pay bumps…

    • today at 12:06 PM

  • bflesch

    today at 11:02 AM

    His name shows up in Epstein files as #1 on Epstein's list of scientists

    https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA003070...

    • everfrustrated

      today at 3:04 PM

      And this folks is exactly the reason we need to remember that there are real costs to demanding transparency. There's a reason some things should have stayed redacted.

    • jnwatson

      today at 12:21 PM

      It doesn't indicate Epstein even met with Cerf. It looks like a wish list.

I'm relatively young and my first exposure to life and work of Vint Cerf was through DTN and Interplanetary Internet. What a life of accomplishment!

My "When I met Vint" story is less exciting then some here. He attended the "Disability Support Group" at Google regularly. He made a point of just being there to listen and support others.

> a relatively good career

What's that for?

• lkramer

  today at 7:43 AM

  I believe it's what is called a joke. I'm with you, I don't like them either.

• khurs

  today at 9:21 AM

  It's written down so no body language.

  The video probably shows a wide smile whilst saying it.

How amazing it must be to be called the 'father' of something that everyone uses... I'm envious. Could I ever create something like that? As a programmer, the dream is always to build something that others actually use properly.

I worked on the ARPANET project under Steve Crocker at UCLA and met his bud Vint there (with his ever-present 3 piece suit, briefcase, and hearing aids) ... what a great guy.

An anecdote: I wrote a program (in Sigma-7 assembler I think) to play Jotto--a bit like Mastermind but with 5 letter words. Vint loved to poke around in people's directories to see what they were up to and found my program. He played it a few times, and then collared me to ask me a couple of questions: 1) It seemed to know some of the words he entered but not all -- what was up with that? 2) What sort of AI algorithm was I using for the program to make guesses? (It usually beat the human player.)

Answers: 1) I didn't have a digitized dictionary (it was 1969!) so I hand-entered the five letter words from a pocket dictionary but got tired halfway through so it only knew words starting with a-l. 2) The program would eliminate any words that didn't fit the responses to its guesses so far and then pick a remaining word at random.

Upon hearing my answers Vint walked away in disgust! But years later he gave me a recommendation when I interviewed with Google (it didn't work out for other reasons).

I also shared a cubicle wall with another Van Nuys High alumni, Jon Postel, aka "God of the Internet". Sartorially, Jon was the complete opposite of Vint--long scraggly beard, blue jeans, forever barefoot--but those weren't the things that mattered. Man, those were the days.

• treyd

  today at 3:24 PM

  Sounds like he was frustrated he lost and thought the program was a lot more clever than it was. :)

So, uh, are they hiring a replacement "Internet Evangelist"? I love the internet, I could evangelize!

IP on everything :D

Vint cerf now vintage cerf

How many "father's of the Internet" are there exactly?

• Y-bar

  today at 11:00 AM

  Exactly as many as the USA has founding fathers, give or take a few. Which is to say less than in the Fathers of Mercy.

• baxtr

  today at 11:03 AM

  Al Gore is definitely one of them!

  • cxr

    today at 11:40 AM

    > There's always some nincompoop who brings that up. Al Gore deserves credit for what he did as a senator and vice president. He helped to pass legislation that enabled the NSFNET backbone to grow and to permit commercial traffic to flow on the government-sponsored backbones in the US. Had he not done that, it's pretty likely that the commercial sector would not have seen an opportunity to create a commercial internet that all of us can enjoy, so he does deserve some credit for what he's done.

    — Vint Cerf, Tracking the Internet into the 21st Century <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hf0rjtnwC9A>

  • throw0101a

    today at 11:18 AM

    > Al Gore is definitely one of them!

    Al Gore Jr.'s father, the Sr., was instrumental in enacting the US Interstate Highway system:

    * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Gore_Sr.#U.S._Senate

    Which transformed the economy for physical goods. Jr saw parallels with the transportation of information, and coined a term (in 1978!) about it:

    * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_superhighway

    * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_and_information_techno...

  • dctoedt

    today at 11:13 AM

    > Al Gore is definitely one of them!

    Absolutely correct — and that's not sarcasm or irony. (Gore never claimed to have "invented the Internet"; that was a calumny spread by Republicans.)

    • greenchair

      today at 11:37 AM

      1999 CNN interview where Gore stated: "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet".

      • gilrain

        today at 12:10 PM

        And that was true, within his context as senator. He was instrumental in passing the laws that fostered the Internet.

        It’s astonishing, I know, but the heavily-parroted meme was always reductive and is, at this point, misnformation.

  • today at 12:07 PM

• My_Name

  today at 11:06 AM

  You have to wonder about the "Mother of the Internet" at this point...

  • slim

    today at 11:48 AM

    DoD

• fragmede

  today at 11:19 AM

  The two that are most widely recognized are Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, for TCP/IP, but that's just the start of it. There's JCR Licklider, who first imagined a global network of computers. There's Leonard Kleinrock, first ARPANET nod and packet-switching theory. Larry Roberts, who led development of ARPANET. Paul Baran independently invented packet switching. Donald Davies coined the term "packet" and also developed packet switching. Louis Pouzin also worked on TCP/IP. Jon Postel managed the IP standards and address assignments for decades. Ray Tomlinson invented email and the @ sign. Of course, we can't forget Tim Berneres-Lee, to whom we credit the invention of the web (HTTP, HTML, URLS, the first web browser and server).

  So, eleven.

  The Dream Machine is a history book by M. Mitchell Waldrop that tells the story of JCR Licklider.

  • mahouk

    today at 2:10 PM

    Vannevar Bush?

Thank you. May your peace continue.

[dead]

Nitpicking: a father of the internet not the father. There is more than one.

• tomhow

  today at 8:44 AM

  Thanks! We’ve updated the title.

  • jibal

    today at 10:17 AM

    Eh? Vint is KNOWN AS "the father of the Internet", and that's what TFA's title says.

    https://web.archive.org/web/20131104212006/http://deafness.a...

    > He is routinely referred to as "the father of the internet,"

    There is no one else who is referred to that way. If you google "father of the Internet", Vint pops up.

    https://www.inmesol.com/blog/fathers-internet/

    > Vinton Cerf (Connecticut, 1943) Considered to be the founding father of the Internet.

    • croes

      today at 10:47 AM

      The title of your second link is "The Fathers of the Internet" and Robert Kahn as co-inventor of TCP/IP protocol is also considered a father of the internet.

      BTW if I google father of the internet I get Cerf and Kahn or it says "a father"

      • jibal

        today at 11:54 AM

        I know what the title says, of course ... but the title is descriptive, not a label, and only Cerf is referred to as the father, as quoted. And yes of course Kahn co-invented TCP/IP but no one ever calls him father of the Internet. And I already said what happens if you google "father of the Internet" -- what I said is actually true.

        And none of this is really relevant because it's TFA that should determine HN titles. But for better or worse the mod has made his decision, so this is moot -- I won't comment on it further.

        And man, for someone who calls something "nitpicking" to dig so deep into it ...

        • croes

          today at 12:21 PM

          > and is recognized as one of "the fathers of the Internet"

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vint_Cerf

          > Widely known as one of the “Fathers of the Internet,

          https://www.internethalloffame.org/vint-cerf/

          > Together with Vint Cerf, Kahn is known as "the father of the Internet." https://computerhistory.org/profile/robert-kahn/

          So much for "but no one ever calls him father of the Internet."

          It’s widely recognized that the internet has multiple fathers.

• pipes

  today at 8:27 AM

  I'm reading "where the wizards stay up late", and I was thinking the same thing. It's difficult to keep track of who is who but I'm pretty certain Cerf has appeared yet. I'm not that far through.

  https://www.amazon.co.uk/Where-Wizards-Stay-Up-Late/dp/06848...

  (Well actually I'm listening to it not reading, maybe that's why I can't keep track of the protagonists!)

[flagged]

• darkarmani

  today at 4:21 PM

  Do you know something about this that no one else knows? How many innocent people do you think are mentioned in those millions of documents?

• saalweachter

  today at 11:29 AM

  N.b. that Cerf was mentioned in the Epstein Files in a list of scientists Epstein wanted to invite to an event. There is no evidence Cerf actually accepted any such invitation.

  Not everyone "in the files" is in the files. For instance, Rebecca Watson is "in the Epstein Files" because Lawrence Kraus and Richard Dawkins wrote to Epstein to complain about her.

• grosswait

  today at 11:43 AM

  I thought we were all aware by now that being on an Epstein list doesn’t automatically mean anything?

  • today at 4:42 PM

  • dwheeler

    today at 3:07 PM

    Should be, but no.

[flagged]

• hdgvhicv

  today at 8:41 AM

  Al Gore pushed for public funding to make the intenet what it is before the majority of computer professionals, let alone the public, had heard of it.

  > Vinton G. Cerf, a senior vice president at MCI Worldcom and the person most often called "the father of the Internet" for his part in designing the network's common computer language, said in an e-mail interview yesterday, "I think it is very fair to say that the Internet would not be where it is in the United States without the strong support given to it and related research areas by the vice president in his current role and in his earlier role as senator."

• tomhow

  today at 8:24 AM

  Please don’t post snarky or low-substance comments on HN.

  As another commenter has pointed out, Vint Cerf himself credits Gore as playing a significant role in enabling the Internet’s emergence. He didn’t claim to have “invented” it.

  • Vaslo

    today at 9:48 AM

    He said he created it though. It’s a quote you can look up.

    • defrost

      today at 10:40 AM

        Gore's actual words were widely reaffirmed by notable Internet pioneers, such as Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, who stated, "No one in public life has been more intellectually engaged in helping to create the climate for a thriving Internet than the Vice President."
      

      ~ peer linked wikipedia article.

      Emphasis on actual words, with an obligatory side dish of context.

      • Vaslo

        today at 3:13 PM

        I’m talking about Gores quote. Did you read that too?

    • throwawaysoxjje

      today at 9:54 AM

      For reference the quote is “ During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet.”

    • andrewl

      today at 1:20 PM

      Quoting from an earlier comment in this discussion:

      There's always some nincompoop who brings that up. Al Gore deserves credit for what he did as a senator and vice president. He helped to pass legislation that enabled the NSFNET backbone to grow and to permit commercial traffic to flow on the government-sponsored backbones in the US. Had he not done that, it's pretty likely that the commercial sector would not have seen an opportunity to create a commercial internet that all of us can enjoy, so he does deserve some credit for what he's done.

      — Vint Cerf, Tracking the Internet into the 21st Century <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hf0rjtnwC9A>

    • jibal

      today at 10:25 AM

      He did not say that. What he did say was true.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_and_information_techno...

      • Vaslo

        today at 3:14 PM

        He said he created it - not sure what hair you’re trying to split here.

    • today at 10:31 AM

  • djtriptych

    today at 9:23 AM

    I took it as a... joke...

    Can we post jokes?? Everyone knows Al Gore didn't sit around in an SV garage inventing the internet.

    • jibal

      today at 10:22 AM

      It's not so much a joke as a smear. Gore was attacked for claiming to be the inventor of the Internet, but he never said that.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_and_information_techno...

  • tosti

    today at 9:44 AM

    You can just hide things you don't like, or y'know, live and let live.

    • kelnos

      today at 9:53 AM

      (The person you are replying to is one of HN's mods.)

    • locknitpicker

      today at 9:55 AM

      > You can just hide things you don't like, or y'know, live and let live.

      The same goes for you. Calling out bullshit and disinformation benefits the whole community,unlike nonsensical remarks. So if you don't appreciate efforts to counter nonsense by bringing facts to the discussion, just sit this one out.

      • tosti

        today at 11:12 AM

        An uphill battle. IMHO it's okay to assume users have brains and they can figure out the difference between facts and jokes just fine.

Thought this was about Tim Berners-Lee, he is the only father I know.

• almost

  today at 8:23 AM

  Father of the web sure. But HTTP is not the Internet!

  • cxr

    today at 11:51 AM

    And the Web is not HTTP!

  • Jaxan

    today at 8:57 AM

    Which also shows there isn’t “one father”, multiple things (and people) had to come together.

• uwagar

  today at 9:26 AM

  he the mother

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Imagine creating internet to connect people and live to see the day that most internet traffic is Bot and AI talk to each other is fascinating

I wonder what he feeling about it

The dude is in his 80s, he should have been allowed to retire decades ago.

• ChrisMarshallNY

  today at 9:37 AM

  I was forced to retire, at 55. Good ol’ SV ageism at work. Wasn’t happy about it -at all, but I’m fortunate, in having the means to do so.

  That was almost nine years ago, and I actually increased my development work, with the caveat that no one pays me to do it, anymore.

  Probably one of the best things that ever happened to me, but I didn’t think so, at the time.

  I wish him luck.

  • bookofjoe

    today at 11:56 AM

    I had to look up SV

    • ChrisMarshallNY

      today at 12:17 PM

      SillyCon Valley

• zeafoamrun

  today at 9:17 AM

  Lots of people continue working because they enjoy it and to keep busy.

  • nubinetwork

    today at 9:55 AM

    When I retire, I'm working on my stuff, not anyone else's. :)

He made millions last 20 years at Google without doing much and just being a honorary post, not sure what he feels about BS jobs like this

• sollewitt

  today at 6:55 AM

  Vint took what could have been a prestige emeritus position at Google and turned it into a platform to champion accessibility and “Greyglers”. The man has more class than his suits.

• sph

  today at 7:33 AM

  Of all the millionaires in the world, I feel he’s earned a little bit of monetary recognition for his achievements.

  Had I coinvented TCP/IP, I’d gladly take a bullshit, cushy paying job in my latter half of my career as a ‘reward’

• fridek

  today at 11:20 AM

  I couldn't disagree more.

  I personally witnessed Vint give valuable advice to managers like me, often in difficult cases. It sounds banal but often in a large corp you know what you need to do, but will have a lot of - justified or not - doubt about whether you can get through the bureaucratic molasses and the political interests of your higher ups. Vint's backing enabled a lot of people to do what's right.

  One of my colleagues has printed and framed a reply from such a thread, where he offered an opinion in support of another manger. Vint replied "This is good advice. V.".

  I hope he enjoys retirement, well deserved

I was impressed with Vint Cerf when I saw him at a distance but once I had dealings with him about issues such as: the way the internet has become a pernicious influence, how the ACM is an industry group for computer science professors that doesn't support practitioners [1], the ACM's support for H-1B visas [2] I came to the conclusion that this quote is about him:

   “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on 
    his not understanding it.”
    
    ― Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked 

[1] open access journals were a big step forward, but I was open access decades before

[2] i'll join a club which is neutral on the issue, but I can't accept the positive position, not because I feel it threatens me but because it pains me to see a brilliant data scientist being jerked around (bad enough that the HR lady leaves) and not being able to tell him "your skills are in demand and you can find another employer on the other side of the street" (this is NYC) And the argument that "startups" need it is bogus: Google can take a chance on a lottery, a key employee at a startup is key however.

• cindyllm

  today at 4:30 PM

  [dead]