Co founder of Internet, Vint Cerf, and all 2008 US Nobel Laureates in Science endorse Obama

by Jason Sanders | October 15, 2008 at 09:01 am | 426 views | 21 comments | 23 recommendations

We've all been warned that Barack Obama has some suspicious friends. Well, you better add Vint Cerf, cofounder of the Internet and Google's Chief Internet Evangelist, and the 2008 Nobel laureates in Science to that list, because they just endorsed the Democratic presidential candidate.

In a YouTube video, Vint Cerf explains why he's voting for Barack Obama by pointing out the importance of net neutrality and why Obama's views on the subject are so important.

On the other hand, all of the 2008 Nobel Laureates in Science, as well as 62 other Nobel Laureates, decided to announce their endorsement of Obama via an open letter to the American people:

We have watched Senator Obama's approach to these issues with admiration. We especially
applaud his emphasis during the campaign on the power of science and technology to enhance
our nation's competitiveness. In particular, we support the measures he plans to take – through
new initiatives in education and training, expanded research funding, an unbiased process for
obtaining scientific advice, and an appropriate balance of basic and applied research – to meet
the nation's and the world's most urgent needs.
Senator Obama understands that Presidential leadership and federal investments in science and
technology are crucial elements in successful governance of the world's leading country. We
hope you will join us as we work together to ensure his election in November.

This is a very interesting turn of events which may push the Democratic candidate ahead of his opponent, John McCain, in the eyes of the public.

recommend Add a comment
Karen Hatter
Karen Hatter
flagged this story as Good Stuff

at 09:30 on October 15th, 2008

A very interesting turn of events indeed. Good stuff, Jason.

0
Jason Sanders

Thanks Karen!

0
master_jim2008

Cerf didn't co-found the internet. the internet was a military communications portal that was transferred to public use.

0
Joi

Vint was pretty instrumental. It was never a "military communications portal". DARPA funded some of the key work of course, but the work was mostly done by students.

See http://www.walthowe.com/navnet/history.html for a pretty good history of the Internet.

Joi
Joi
flagged this story as Good Stuff

at 10:15 on October 15th, 2008

Good story. More smart people who like Obama. ;-)

0
Jason Sanders

Thanks Joi! Pretty good news :)

0
veni markovski

Thanks for this, and for the pictures. I've blogged at Obama's site about it.

0
Jason Sanders

Thanks for the great photo and blogging about this, Veni!

0
vint cerf

To Jim,



Bob Kahn and I designed the Internet architecture and TCP/IP protocols starting in 1973 as a project supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Bob was at DARPA when this started and I joined the agency in 1976 to lead the program until 1982. The commercialization did not happen until 1989.


Vint

0
Jason Sanders

Thanks for the clarification, Mr Cerf. Many people forget that while there were quite a few networks operating independantly before you and Mr Kahn designed the TCP/IP protocols, they couldn't communicate with each other. Until you did that there was no Internet.

0
Babel-Fish

TCP/IP was to do with net working and linking computers to computer and well done in doing so as without those factors the ideas of the science fiction writer Murray Leinster would not of came to fruitation the internet was made possible by the software

In 1980, physicist Tim Berners-Lee, who was an independent contractor at CERN, proposed and prototyped ENQUIRE, a system for CERN researchers to use and share documents. In 1989, Berners-Lee and CERN data systems engineer Robert Cailliau each submitted separate proposals for an Internet-based hypertext system providing similar functionality. The following year, they collaborated on a joint proposal, the WorldWideWeb (W3) project,[1] which was accepted by CERN.

I would therefore quote you as being the co-founder of networking and connectivity that lead to the final conception of the Internet and not as reported by the author of this article as the co-founder. I there for say your part of the team of developers that with Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau made the WWW a reality and not science fiction of the founder of the idea. I salute you...

 

  

RayBanBro66
RayBanBro66
flagged this story as Good Stuff

at 11:59 on October 15th, 2008

Jason Sanders, I like this story. It's good stuff. 

0
bo_stern

This picture was taking right after a very captivating panel celebrating the 30th anniversary of the first TCP-based transmission between three dissimilar networks (essentially the birth of the internet) at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. It was captured with a fairly low-res 1G iPhone. Link: http://bit.ly/1lxT04

bo_stern has contributed a photo to this story.

0
natazouf

Vint Cerf, interviewed by Charlie Rose, at the Opening Session of the 2007 General Meeting of the Special Libraries Association in Seattle.

natazouf has contributed a photo to this story.

charlesc
charlesc
flagged this story as Good Stuff

at 18:30 on October 15th, 2008

Vint is cool :)

0
Jason Sanders

ditto. Thanks!

0
Mark Yang

Vint Cerf's give a speech at TANET2007 conference at Taiwan.

Mark Yang has contributed a photo to this story.

0
Be The Media

Vint Cerf with Be The Media's David Mathison at the www.InternetforEveryone.com announcement in New York City (July 3, 2008)

Be The Media has contributed a photo to this story.

0
eastvanray

I always wondered who Al Gore's partner was in inventing the Internet. 

Babel-Fish
Babel-Fish
flagged this story as Good Stuff

at 04:46 on October 18th, 2008

Jason Sanders,

This may help:

A 1946 comic science-fiction story, A Logic Named Joe, by Murray Leinster laid out the Internet and many of its strengths and weaknesses. However, it took more than a decade before reality began to catch up with this vision.

The USSR's launch of Sputnik spurred the United States to create the Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as ARPA, in February 1958 to regain a technological lead.[2][3] ARPA created the Information Processing Technology Office (IPTO) to further the research of the Semi Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) program, which had networked country-wide radar systems together for the first time. J. C. R. Licklider was selected to head the IPTO, and saw universal networking as a potential unifying human revolution.

Licklider moved from the Psycho-Acoustic Laboratory at Harvard University to MIT in 1950, after becoming interested in information technology. At MIT, he served on a committee that established Lincoln Laboratory and worked on the SAGE project. In 1957 he became a Vice President at BBN, where he bought the first production PDP-1 computer and conducted the first public demonstration of time-sharing.

At the IPTO, Licklider recruited Lawrence Roberts to head a project to implement a network, and Roberts based the technology on the work of Paul Baran,[citation needed] who had written an exhaustive study for the U.S. Air Force that recommended packet switching (as opposed to circuit switching) to make a network highly robust and survivable. After much work, the first two nodes of what would become the ARPANET were interconnected between UCLA and SRI International in Menlo Park, California, on October 29, 1969. The ARPANET was one of the "eve" networks of today's Internet. Following on from the demonstration that packet switching worked on the ARPANET, the British Post Office, Telenet, DATAPAC and TRANSPAC collaborated to create the first international packet-switched network service. In the UK, this was referred to as the International Packet Switched Service (IPSS), in 1978. The collection of X.25-based networks grew from Europe and the US to cover Canada, Hong Kong and Australia by 1981. The X.25 packet switching standard was developed in the CCITT (now called ITU-T) around 1976. X.25 was independent of the TCP/IP protocols that arose from the experimental work of DARPA on the ARPANET, Packet Radio Net and Packet Satellite Net during the same time period. Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn developed the first description of the TCP protocols during 1973 and published a paper on the subject in May 1974. Use of the term "Internet" to describe a single global TCP/IP network originated in December 1974 with the publication of RFC 675, the first full specification of TCP that was written by Vinton Cerf, Yogen Dalal and Carl Sunshine, then at Stanford University. During the next nine years, work proceeded to refine the protocols and to implement them on a wide range of operating systems.

The first TCP/IP-based wide-area network was operational by January 1, 1983 when all hosts on the ARPANET were switched over from the older NCP protocols. In 1985, the United States' National Science Foundation (NSF) commissioned the construction of the NSFNET, a university 56 kilobit/second network backbone using computers called "fuzzballs" by their inventor, David L. Mills. The following year, NSF sponsored the conversion to a higher-speed 1.5 megabit/second network. A key decision to use the DARPA TCP/IP protocols was made by Dennis Jennings, then in charge of the Supercomputer program at NSF.

The opening of the network to commercial interests began in 1988. The US Federal Networking Council approved the interconnection of the NSFNET to the commercial MCI Mail system in that year and the link was made in the summer of 1989. Other commercial electronic e-mail services were soon connected, including OnTyme, Telemail and Compuserve. In that same year, three commercial Internet service providers (ISP) were created: UUNET, PSINET and CERFNET. Important, separate networks that offered gateways into, then later merged with, the Internet include Usenet and BITNET. Various other commercial and educational networks, such as Telenet, Tymnet, Compuserve and JANET were interconnected with the growing Internet. Telenet (later called Sprintnet) was a large privately funded national computer network with free dial-up access in cities throughout the U.S. that had been in operation since the 1970s. This network was eventually interconnected with the others in the 1980s as the TCP/IP protocol became increasingly popular. The ability of TCP/IP to work over virtually any pre-existing communication networks allowed for a great ease of growth, although the rapid growth of the Internet was due primarily to the availability of commercial routers from companies such as Cisco Systems, Proteon and Juniper, the availability of commercial Ethernet equipment for local-area networking and the widespread implementation of TCP/IP on the UNIX operating system.

The internet was in fact a joint thing its a case of bits and pieces and development but the founder was a comic science fiction writer Murray Leinster 1946.

TCP/IP was only one part of the great puzzel but there was a more important part concerning the software HTML of which linked it all together

In 1980, physicist Tim Berners-Lee, who was an independent contractor at CERN, proposed and prototyped ENQUIRE, a system for CERN researchers to use and share documents. In 1989, Berners-Lee and CERN data systems engineer Robert Cailliau each submitted separate proposals for an Internet-based hypertext system providing similar functionality. The following year, they collaborated on a joint proposal, the WorldWideWeb (W3) project,[1] which was accepted by CERN.

But of course Vint Cerf play a role with the many others to achieve this great tool that nowpublic operates on. I personally wish to salute all those involved as the Internet has been a big part of my life.     

Rhonda J Mangus
Rhonda J Mangus
flagged this story as Good Stuff

at 06:11 on October 21st, 2008

Jason Sanders, I like this story. It's good stuff.

Add a comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.

October 15, 2008 at 09:01 am by Jason Sanders, 426 views, 21 comments

Vote for us at the Mashable Open Web Awards 2008

Crowd Power

Karen Hatter
First Flagged at 9:30 AM, Oct 15, 2008 by Karen Hatter
These members have powered this story:
 

closeSign in to NowPublic

is reporting from