Still Netting after all these years
By Nick Wingfield

Staff Writer, CNET NEWS.COM

One would expect the man known as the "father of the Internet" to resemble an aged Fred McMurray--retired, nostalgic, and wrapped in a cardigan. But nearly 30 years after joining the team of engineers that erected ARPANET, the Department of Defense-sponsored predecessor to the Internet, Vinton G. Cerf is still very much on the job.

Now responsible for overseeing MCI's Internet backbone, the largest carrier of Net traffic in the world, the 50-something Cerf is as excited about the present and future of the global network as he is about the past. And what a past it is.

Cerf joined the original ARPANET team in 1968 as a programmer, helping to cobble together the first nodes of the network a year later. At the time, ARPANET consisted of a handful of room-sized host computers on university campuses connected for the purpose of sharing computing resources. Within a few years, email became a hugely popular application within the small society of ARPANET users, helping to fuel the growth of the network.

In 1974, after picking up a Ph.D. in computer science from UCLA, Cerf and several colleagues produced what would become a vital, albeit clumsily named technology for the Internet, the transmission control protocol/Internet protocol (TCP/IP). As it caught on over the next decade, TCP/IP provided a common dialect that allowed networks of all stripes--with names like CSNET, BITNET, and NSFNET--to be linked into a common internetwork, or, as we know it, Internet. Today, that same protocol underlies every Internet application, from email to the Web to audio streaming.

It's not hard to see how Cerf's celebrity has risen above that of his ARPANET colleagues. Charming, cultured, and a bit of a dandy, he defies the myth of the stereotypical nerd engineer. From the time he was in high school, Cerf was determined to make an impression by dressing in coat and tie and carrying a briefcase. "I wasn't so interested in differentiating myself from my parents, but I wanted to differentiate myself from the rest of my friends just to sort of stick out," he said.

In conversation, he speaks with equal delight about wine (Montrachet white burgundies are good, older Bordeaux are risky) and the cochlear implant that almost completely restored his wife's hearing recently after a lifetime of deafness. If the Internet can possibly be represented by a single face, it is Cerf's friendly bearded and balding visage. (People magazine placed him on its 1994 25 most intriguing people list.)

There's also an air of diplomacy to Cerf, a quality that has aided him throughout years of contentious debates with engineers over the course of Internet standards. At a 1992 meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force, as a heated argument over the future of Internet protocols turned angry, Cerf diffused the controversy by stripping down to a T-shirt bearing the slogan "IP on Everything." Even as the Internet becomes a high stakes arena for businesses, Cerf believes cooperation is critical for keeping the Internet in order.

These days, Cerf seems flattered but slightly uncomfortable with the idea that he is the father of anything but two grown sons. MCI, though, clearly relishes his legend status, regularly trotting him out to speak and schmooze his dazzled fans. In 1994, the telecommunications company jumped at the opportunity to rehire him (Cerf developed MCI Mail for the company in the early 80s), as if it were a record company presented with the chance to hire Elvis as a vice president.

Cerf remains emotionally connected to his ARPANET days, exchanging email with former colleagues over the network they created. But he displays little nostalgia for an era when Net access was limited to a few dozen engineers eager to share their computers. Cerf is a supporter of Ethernet inventor Bob Metcalfe's law: The value of a network increases in direct proportion to the number of people connected to it.

NEWS.COM talked with Cerf at our San Francisco headquarters about everything from Internet standards and MCI's pending merger with British Telecom to the now famous T-shirt incident.

NEWS.COM: If you could rebuild the Net from scratch, what would you do differently?
Cerf: One thing I'd definitely do is pick a bigger address space than 32 bits. I have a rationale for having ended up with that number, but looking at it in 1997, it doesn't hold too much water. I can only be forgiven that this was a decision made 20 years ago when I didn't have adequate foresight to realize what an explosion [the Internet] would be.

I would probably go in and integrate security into the system more fully than I did. I don't mean to claim all this credit; many other people did this. Collectively, we didn't do some things. But remember the time period in place where this work was being done: It was the 1970s, the Vietnam war was going on, and most of the work was being done by graduate students in universities. If we had gone in with any kind of military-sounding crypto, even given that we were allowed to do that (which we would not have been because it was all classified anyway), I think we wouldn't have gotten very far.

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