Early life and interests
Shubika Taneja: What was your childhood like? Were there some early interests or incidents that may have shaped your journey as a scientist and as an inventor?
Dr. Vint Cerf: I got interested in science and mathematics pretty early, when I was 10 years old. I complained to my math teacher that there must be more to mathematics than addition, multiplication, division, and fractions. He said yes and he gave me a seventh grade algebra book. I went home and answered all the problems over the summer and got very, very excited about how much fun they were, especially the word problems. Because they were like little Agatha Christie novels where you had to go figure out what was X.
Around that same time, my parents got me a chemistry set. This was 1953. In those years you got some really fascinating chemicals that they probably can’t get today. One of them was potassium permanganate. When you mix that glycerin, it is hypergolic. It erupts into flame on its own. We used to make a little Plaster of Paris volcanoes, and we put in the glycerin, and the potassium permanganate and powdered magnesium, and powdered aluminum, and powdered iron, and watched the thing go up.
I remember one of the first books I read was most interesting to me called “Microbe Hunters” by a guy named Paul de Kruif. It told the story of how Antonie Philips van Leeuwenhoek, a Dutch lensmaker, invented one of the first microscopes. I was certain I wanted to go into some kind of science. I thought for a while that I was going to be a particle physicist, but math really grabbed my attention, and eventually later on in my career, computing. I ended up going down the computing path and not long after doing my undergraduate work, I went to work for IBM. I got drawn into that and of course I was permanently infected with networking while at UCLA and that’s been the story of my career.
Developing the internet
You have seen the evolution of technology through several decades and the mind-blowing disruptions that have happened in that time. Cloud computing has truly transformed business and the various applications of the Internet. It is incredible what businesses are achieving today. Is this something that you saw coming? What were you thinking when you helped invent the Internet with your colleague, Robert Kahn? And what do you think about the future of the Internet in a world where artificial intelligence and machine learning are becoming increasingly powerful?
When Bob and I started working on the Internet, we were doing this for the Defense Department, the Advanced Research Projects Agency [now called DARPA], which meant that we were designing something that was intended to be used for command and control. That was our primary objective. How do we hook all these different kinds of computers and different kinds of networks together? A challenging design problem because it involved very different kinds of packet-switched networks.
The people who were designing and building it were largely graduate students, or people working in research laboratories. We were using the system as we were building it. One of the earliest applications was remote access to other people’s computers run programs and to transfer files back and forth. In 1971, networked electronic mail was invented by one of our colleagues Ray Tomlinson. He was the guy that selected the @ sign to separate the personal identifier from the host identifier. Those applications told us first that there was a lot of utility to connecting computers together. But the second thing that told us is that there was a social component to what we were doing.
