【OHI】Vint Cerf interview selection
Well, certainly, getting the TCP designed and, and then developed was a big deal, and, of course, it's turned into this gigantic global internet, Running the internet program for ARPA was a big change for me, one that was a huge opportunity because it gave me much more scope. I ran the packet radio and the packet satellite program, and the package security programs, in addition to the internet program, while I was ARPA for those six years. It’s hard to beat that six years’ experience, especially, because you're writing, the one writing the checks, right, so you could say to people, yes, you can do this and I’ll pay for it. So that was an important part of my career.
Well, certainly, getting the TCP designed and, and then developed was a big deal, and, of course, it's turned into this gigantic global internet, Running the internet program for ARPA was a big change for me, one that was a huge opportunity because it gave me much more scope. I ran the packet radio and the packet satellite program, and the package security programs, in addition to the internet program, while I was ARPA for those six years. It’s hard to beat that six years’ experience, especially, because you're writing, the one writing the checks, right, so you could say to people, yes, you can do this and I’ll pay for it. So that was an important part of my career.
Vint Cerf
“I’m not trying to be weird, But I didn't want to look like everybody else”
BZ: I sort of begin to envision, and, you are at school, is quite like the boy, easily interact with other people, and got friends and then also built rela......... you know, friendship like, and you know, you and Steven Croker there, and that kind of friendship you start from the high school and always last, you know, so long, so long. So, are you a very pleasant boy when you were very younger?
VC: Well, I was a little weird because, um, I was nerdy at the time. Uh, so, I wore a sports coat, and a tie, and slacks to school, and carried a briefcase. I guarantee nobody else did that. But I didn't want to look like everybody else, you know. So that
BZ: You start that kind of tie high school? Okay.
VC: Yes, I wasn't wearing three-piece suits, but I was wearing, you know sports coat slacks and tie. Because I didn't, this is my way of being slightly rebellious. I didn't, I didn't want to look like everybody else with T-shirts and jeans and things like that. And so, that sort of work. And I was also in the reserve officer training program ROTC, junior ROTC in high school. And so when I wasn't wearing my sports coast in slacks and so on, I was wearing a military uniform and I enjoyed that because I learned a lot from that experience as well. I never actually served in the military because of my hearing. But, at least, I learned a little bit about what that was about from my ROTC training.
BZ: Outside. and you know, you look a little bit different from other, other things, but inside and how, how, how are you different also from other boys at that time?
VC: Well, it's always hard to tell because you can never figure out what's inside somebody's head.
“I really wanted to go there(Stanford)”
BZ: So, that's naturally, you would go to college, you want to go to Stanford and not about the East Coast, some MIT, like other people do, Harvard, Princeton or, so how, how you decide to go somewhere close?
VC: Well, this is an interesting story. Because when I was 13, I would have been in 8th grade. And my father had a friend who worked at RSI International. At the time, it was called Stanford Research Institute. And, I was invited up to, uh, to, by my father's friend, to go visit the Stanford campus. So, we went on to the campus. I met some of the professors, I remembered 8th grade. So, I’m some ways away from graduating to go to college. And I was convinced, once I got into the campus, that I really wanted to go there. It’s a beautiful campus, people I met were smart, and they were, you know, uh, energetic and enthusiastic. However, it was expensive in relative terms, you know. Looking back on it, of course, the numbers are really almost comical, the annual tuition at Stanford at that time was 2,500 dollars. Today, it's more like 50,000 dollars. But, by good fortune, the North American Aviation had a scholarship p program that you could compete for. So I competed for a four-year scholarship in one, about 10,000-dollar scholarship to Stanford University. So, I was able to afford to go there.
Because of premature birth, Vint Cerf had a hearing problem since childhood.
BZ: So, you began to have hearing issues at, after 12?
VC: I was born in six weeks premature, and so we think that, uh, because I was put in an oxygen, uh, tank, an oxygen tank, uh, as has that when I was born. Some people think that the hearing problem that I have. 12 or 13 years old. I started wearing hearing aids because it was clear that I was declining and I needed the assistive technology. So, it just happened by accident that we both have the same hearing aid dealer, and he simply asked me to come in on a Saturday and asked her to come in on Saturday, and then introduced us and left. And, and then he closed the store. So, we're standing out on the sidewalk on Wilshire Boulevard. And, I’m thinking, gee, she’s really cute, maybe we should go have lunch. So, we had lunch. And, that's when I discovered what she was an artist. And, so, the Los Angeles Art Center is just a block down the street, so after lunch, she said, “Why don't we go and look at some of my favorite paintings?” Her favorite paintings. So, she took me to see some of her favorite paintings. And one of them was a Kandinsky. And I looked at it for a while, and I said you know this looks like a floating green hamburger. And, at this point, if this were a movie, this would be one of those things where the audience would get to choose, okay, this is the decision point, is this guy completely philistine is hopeless, and I should forget him, or is he reparable. Fortunately, she decided I was reparable. And so, we, uh, continued dating after that.
“Designing TCP/IP was a big deal, I was pretty proud of that effort.”
BZ: Okay, so, um, we just talk back like the most important achievement in your life and all other people are thinking TCP/IP, definitely, as your highlights of your career. Um, but when you look back there, I see a very rewarding career, a lot of achievements you already made even after that wonder, so what was the highlights of your career? You, you really think TCP will be…
VC: Well, certainly, getting the TCP designed and, and then developed was a big deal, and, of course, it's turned into this gigantic global internet, Running the internet program for ARPA was a big change for me, one that was a huge opportunity because it gave me much more scope. I ran the packet radio and the packet satellite program, and the package security programs, in addition to the internet program, while I was ARPA for those six years. It’s hard to beat that six years’ experience, especially, because you're writing, the one writing the checks, right, so you could say to people, yes, you can do this and I’ll pay for it. So that was an important part of my career.
Then, I went into the private sector to work for MCI and built something called MCI mail, which is a commercial email service in 1983, which frankly, was probably 10 years too early. There existed email services at that time; there was a CompuServe, for example. Telenet, which was started by Larry Roberts, when he left ARPA at TeleMail, uh, TimeNet, which was run by Bob Harcharik, uh, had OnTime, which is, uh, another, uh, commercial electronic mail service. But each one of them was a separate independent, um, wall gardened. They couldn't interact with each other. So, I did MCI Mail for Bob Harcharik who was taken from TimeNet to MCI, and he hired me to do MCImail. We put that together in about 9 months at the beginning of 1983 to September 27, turned it on. What was interesting about that project is that we, we broke a bunch of rules about email, basically, allowing people to compose emails that would be sent either to other MCI Mail recipients or other email recipients of other, we anticipated, connecting to other email services, or to telex terminations, or to postal addresses. And, so, if somebody composed an email with a postal address destination, we would reprint it, put it in an envelope and mail it, in addition to the other electronic deliveries. That was very advanced for the time. Eventually, the fax was also included. So, I was pretty proud of that effort; uh, it persisted from 1983 to 2003.
“2015, Digital Dark Age”
BZ: Back in 2015, you were mentioning about a digital dark age, um, to my understanding in those days, you were mentioning about so much data loss, you know, so many things that loss because of our infrastructure, of devices we use. Do you still hold the same idea like, you know, you, you define what`s digital…?
VC: Yes, I’m still very concerned about what I’ll call the loss of digital content, and there are several different factors involved, the medium that we store bits on may not last as long as some other technologies, for example, vellum, which is sheepskin, for example, or goatskin; some of those vellum documents have lasted well over a thousand years, some of them two thousand years. And if you can still read Greek or Latin, you can still read the content. But think about, uh, five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy disks, three-and-half-inch floppy disks, um, DVDs and CD-ROMs and now Blu-ray and so on. Uh, sometimes you can't find a reader to read the medium even if you still have the disks. Or, maybe, you have a hard drive, except it has a certain format of plug and no computer in existence knows how to interconnect with that either physically or logically; what's the control function for that? And, so, storing bits away in various media turned out not to be very long-lived. So, I’m worried about that. I’m also worried about the fact that you might need software to correctly interpret the bits that you've stored. So, if it's a spreadsheet that you stored away as a file, even if you can read the bits if you don't have a program that knows what the bits means, you're not going to be able to read.
