Vinton Cerf – The Man Who Invented the Internet

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Surprisingly, Vinton Cerf stopped working with ARPA because of money. He himself would later say: “In 1982, I started calculating the cost of my son’s college education and realized that I would hardly be able to pay for it if I stayed on the government salary.” And Vinton accepted an invitation to work at MCI Communications Corp. There he was supposed to organize e-mail.

MCI Mail is one of the first commercial email services, which lasted on the market from 1983 to 2003. By the way, the program was also a breakthrough, it was possible to send regular paper letters via email. It worked like this: You entered the text of the letter and the postal address in electronic form, and the system found out where the letter was going, sent it there. In the process, it was printed, and the address was glued to the envelope, which was sent by mail. Vinton worked for the corporation until 1986, then moved to CNRI [Corporation for National Research Initiatives – корпорация национальных исследовательских инициатив].

In 1988, Vinton Cerf concluded, “The Internet was unlikely to get very big unless it became a self-sustaining system. It had to be a commercial engine, not just something the government bought and paid for.” By that year, the National Science Foundation’s NSFNet already existed. But it was under heavy government control, and Cerf saw no opportunity for it to grow quickly. This conclusion did not come out of nowhere; a major role in this was played by the entry of Interop.

Interop is an annual conference on information technology, which has been held since 1986 to the present day. Its initiator, Daniel Lynch, died in 2024, and any Internet user should honor his memory, he contributed to it. Vinton Cerf appreciated Daniel, who initially created a training session for software manufacturers, and as a result, a conference was created, which celebrated its thirtieth anniversary in 2016.

In 1986, the first conference was dedicated specifically to TCP. Daniel, as he later recalled, personally convinced engineers and other specialists from MIT, Stanford, ISI and other organizations to come to the event. The problem was that not everyone knew each other. As you remember, ARPA had three working groups working on TCP, and IBM had as many as 5 such working groups! At first, Daniel gathered a hundred people, then more than 300. In 1988, there were already 5,000 of them and 50 large suppliers, the “training” conference became a large trade and representative exhibition!

In 1988, Vinton, who at that time also worked at CNRI, initiated the introduction of MCI Mail, a commercial e-mail, to the Internet. He had both a scientific interest (are these systems compatible?) and a commercial-political one (an unofficial ban on placing commercial projects on the Internet). And Cerf received permission to introduce mail! A gateway was developed, mail and the Internet were connected, and in 1989 the system started working. And this was a “bomb explosion” in the Internet space. Immediately after that, all other providers of commercial e-mail services began to demand an Internet connection. No one wanted to give MCI any advantage. Both tasks that Vinton set for himself were fully accomplished. Commerce entered the Internet.

As Vinton and Robert Kahn watched the commerce on the Internet, they realized that government funding for Internet standards work would soon end. And so, at the turn of 1991–1992, an organization called the Internet Society was created. [Internet Society, ISOC]. Vinton and Robert were among its co-organizers, while Cerf headed this organization from 1992 to 1995. The main task of the organization (in addition to a number of educational functions) was to provide financial support for developments in the field of Internet technologies. The fundamental difference between this organization and all previous ones was that it did not have clear and unambiguous state support based on an institute, university or department.

In 1994, Vinton returned to MCI and simultaneously took on a number of commercial developments, managed technology strategy until 2005, and worked on a huge list of commercial technologies, including voice/video communications. One of the important ideas was the Internet in space. In a 1999 interview, Cerf boldly said that by 2008, satellites around Mars would become part of the interplanetary Internet. Practice has shown that the situation is somewhat different. At the same time, the development of the interplanetary Internet is indeed underway. There is a fairly detailed story on Habr about the specifics of the interplanetary Internetthere is nothing to add to it yet, except for a big video interview with Vinton Cerf in 2022, which is also available at this link. No breakthrough in this technology is expected yet.

Vinton is now primarily involved in social programs related to the Internet sphere, and speaks a lot. He has raised a number of serious issues: digital obsolescence (and the possibility of a “digital Dark Age”), the problem of long-term storage of information. Now he speaks more often about problems related to both AI and the interplanetary Internet. During the Covid-19 pandemic, he and his wife suffered greatly, after which Vinton focused a lot of attention on the active use of the Internet and modern technologies in medicine. He also constantly works for the benefit of people with hearing problems.

Now, before moving on to acknowledging Vinton's merits, I think it's necessary to turn to his personal life. As you remember, Vinton was born prematurely and could well have died. He “got off” with his hearing. His family took this calmly, and Vinton did not experience any critical inconveniences in life because of his problem.

But his future wife, Sigrid, lost her hearing at the age of 3. Her parents tried to hush up the problem. Sigrid did not attend a school for the deaf and was “outside” their community, she graduated from a regular school, received a bachelor's degree in art history, learned to read lips so quickly that Vinton joked that she was a CIA agent. At the same time, she wore a hearing aid, but her hearing was extremely poor. Only at 53, she received a cochlear implant, and she again returned to the “world of sounds.”

Sigrid and Vint met in the most surprising place – a store selling hearing aids. They went to lunch at a restaurant and became so engrossed in each other that Sigrid forgot to take her mother to the airport. After some time, they got married, and later the family had two sons, David and Bennett. One is an Apple employee, the other is a cameraman in Hollywood. Vint himself has said many times that his family has always been his support, protection and even a textbook. He has always learned both in his scientific life and in his personal life.

To say that Vinton Cerf is “recognized by the world scientific and professional community” is to say nothing. Over the past 20 years, he has led countless associations, unions, and communities. Among his awards, two are worth mentioning: the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Queen Elizabeth Award for Engineering Achievement. You saw the image of the awarding of the first in 2005 above. This award is one of the two highest awards available to civilians in the United States. The second award is worth mentioning for two reasons. The first (a funny tautology) is that this was the first time this award was given. Pioneers in work, pioneers in awarding. The second reason is the company in which the award was received. Vinton Cerf, Robert Kahn, Louis Pouzin received awards for their contribution to the Internet. Tim Berners-Lee – for the World Wide Web, Marc Andreessen (for some reason unknown to me, he is not in the photographs) – for the Mosaic web browser.

There were many other awards. For example, Vinton was awarded the title of “honorary doctor” by no less than 28 different universities, including the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, which Vinton Cerf visited on August 27, 2010. There he gave a lecture “The Future of the Internet: How the Internet Will Affect Our Lives.” Anyone can watch the video recording of this lecture for themselves.

Vinton remains quite active and has maintained his sense of humor. He recently spoke at the University of Waterloo on June 17, 2024, where he was asked about AI. In response, Vinton shared a story about asking an AI to write his obituary. The obituary got some things right, but Cerf noted that he was credited with a number of innovations he did not work on, and even had additional family members invented.

Of particular interest is Vinton's answer to the rather provocative question of whether he feels responsible for “all the negativity” that the Internet brings. Without losing his cool, the scientist answered that he considers the Internet, which was created with his participation, to be an incredibly creative and unique environment. He would like to reduce the negative aspects, but Vinton does not plan to take responsibility for people's decisions to abuse opportunities. Healthy pragmatism, nothing more.

I would like to finish the story about Cerf with another of his answers to a simple and “childish” question: “How to make something grandiose?” The question was asked to the right place, because the Internet cannot be called anything other than a “grandiose project”. The answer is very simple: “If you are smart, people who are smarter than you will help you. That’s what Bob and I did. We assembled a team of really smart people. We didn’t imagine anything that we see today. The model we proposed was as simple as we could come up with, and then we just had to convince people to support the standards we came up with and developed for the common good. The main goal of the Internet is to give everyone the opportunity to interact with everyone, and we succeeded. This happened because an incredible number of people contributed. Feeling like you are a part of something bigger than you are is a very powerful motivator. I know it sounds very trite. But this is really what helped create the Internet.”

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