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Because he had been born prematurely, Cerf was hearing impaired, and he began using a hearing aid at age thirteen. Around that time he also started wearing a coat and tie to school and carrying a briefcase. “I didn’t want to fit in with everybody else,” he said. “I wanted to look different, be noticed. That was a very effective way to do it, and it was better than wearing a nose ring, which I figured my Dad would not have put up with in the 1950’s.”103
In high school he became best friends with Crocker, and they spent weekends together doing science projects and playing 3-D chess. After graduating from Stanford and working for IBM for two years, he became a doctoral student at UCLA, where he worked in Kleinrock’s group. There he met Bob Kahn, and they remained close after Kahn went to work at BBN and then ARPA.
When Kahn embarked on his internetwork endeavor in the spring of 1973, he visited Cerf and described all the packet-switched networks that had sprung up in addition to the ARPANET. “How are we going to hook these different kinds of packet-nets to each other?” Kahn asked. Cerf seized on the challenge, and the two of them launched into a three-month burst of collaboration that would lead to the creation of the Internet. “He and I clicked instantly on this,” Kahn later said. “Vint is the kind of guy who likes to roll up his sleeves and say let’s get on with it. I thought that was a breath of fresh air.”104
They began by organizing a meeting at Stanford in June 1973 to gather ideas. As a result of this collaborative approach, Cerf later said, the solution “turned out to be the open protocol that everybody had a finger in at one time or another.”105 But most of the work was done as a duet by Kahn and Cerf, who holed up for intense sessions at Rickeys Hyatt House in Palo Alto or at a hotel next to Dulles Airport. “Vint liked to get up and draw these spider drawings,” Kahn recalled. “Often times we would have a conversation back and forth and he would say, ‘Let me draw a picture of that.’ ”106
One day in October 1973, Cerf made a simple sketch in a San Francisco hotel lobby that codified their approach. It showed various networks like the ARPANET and PRNET, each with lots of host computers co
They rejected the idea that the networks could each keep their own different protocols, although that would have been easier to sell. They wanted a common protocol. That would allow the new internetwork to scale up explosively, since any computer or network using the new protocol could link in without requiring a translation system. The traffic between ARPANET and any other network should be seamless. So they came up with the idea of having every computer adopt the same method and template for addressing its packets. It was as if every postcard mailed in the world had to have a four-line address specifying street number and city and country using the Roman alphabet.
The result was an Internet Protocol (IP) that specified how to put the packet’s destination in its header and helped determine how it would travel through networks to get there. Layered above it was a higher-level Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) that instructed how to put the packets back together in the right order, checked to see if any of them was missing, and requested retransmission of any information that had been lost. These became known as TCP/IP. Kahn and Cerf published them as a paper called “A Protocol for Packet Network Interco
On the twentieth a
All the world’s a net! And all the data in it merely packets
come to store-and-forward in the queues a while and then are
heard no more. ’Tis a network waiting to be switched!
To switch or not to switch? That is the question:
Whether ’tis wiser in the net to suffer
The store and forward of stochastic networks,
Or to raise up circuits against a sea of packets,
And by dedication serve them? 107
A generation later, in 2014, Cerf was working at Google in Washington, DC, still enjoying himself and marveling at the wonders they had wrought by creating the Internet. Wearing Google Glass, he noted that every year brings something new. “Social networks—I joined Facebook as an experiment—business apps, mobile, new things keep piling onto the Internet,” he said. “It has scaled up a million times over. Not many things can do that without breaking. And yet those old protocols we created are doing just fine.”108
NETWORKED CREATIVITY
So who does deserve the most credit for inventing the Internet? (Hold the inevitable Al Gore jokes. We will get to his role—yes, he did have one—in chapter 10.) As with the question of who invented the computer, the answer is that it was a case of collaborative creativity. As Paul Baran later explained to the technology writers Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, using a beautiful image that applies to all i
The process of technological development is like building a cathedral. Over the course of several hundred years new people come along and each lays down a block on top of the old foundations, each saying, “I built a cathedral.” Next month another block is placed atop the previous one. Then comes along an historian who asks, “Well, who built the cathedral?” Peter added some stones here, and Paul added a few more. If you are not careful, you can con yourself into believing that you did the most important part. But the reality is that each contribution has to follow onto previous work. Everything is tied to everything else.109
The Internet was built partly by the government and partly by private firms, but mostly it was the creation of a loosely knit cohort of academics and hackers who worked as peers and freely shared their creative ideas. The result of such peer sharing was a network that facilitated peer sharing. This was not mere happenstance. The Internet was built with the belief that power should be distributed rather than centralized and that any authoritarian diktats should be circumvented. As Dave Clark, one of the early participants in the Internet Engineering Task Force, put it, “We reject kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in rough consensus and ru
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The network pioneers J. C. R. Licklider and Bob Taylor realized that the Internet, because of how it was built, had an inherent tendency to encourage peer-to-peer co