Now we’ve got this damned airplane in flight; How do we change engines without crashing the thing?
Predictor: Cerf, Vinton G.
Prediction, in context:In a 1994 article for Network World, Adam Gaffin talks with Internet pioneer Vinton Cerf just before he and a group of other Internet founders met for a gathering to celebrate the 25th anniversary of their invention. Gaffin writes: ”The ARPANET’s builders will gather in Boston to commemorate their pioneering work at a ceremony … They foresee continued exponential growth for the Internet, provided it can overcome a series of technological, economic and political obstacles. Many of those hurdles are coming to the forefront as the Internet is reengineered to handle growing demand and ever-more-complex applications … Vinton Cerf, who helped develop TCP/IP, summed it up this way: ‘Now we’ve got this damned airplane in flight; How do we change engines without crashing the thing?’ Cerf recalled how the original version of TCP, released in 1974, had provisions for nearly 256 networks. At the time, nobody thought there would ever be more than 10 or 15 networks, in large part because of the expense of linking them together. That was, however, before Robert Metcalfe developed the specifications for Ethernet. Cerf, now president of the Internet Society and senior vice president for data architecture at MCI, said the Internet needs billions of new potential addresses for the day when packet communications devices become ubiquitous and the Internet becomes a channel for voice and video, in addition to data.”
Biography:Vinton G. Cerf was one of the key figures in the Internet Society in the 1990s. He earlier worked with C.S. Carr and Steve Crocker to publish the first ARPANET host-host protocol in 1970. In 1972, he was appointed first chair of International Network Working Group which was initiated to establish common technical standards to enable any computer to connect to the ARPANET. In 1973, he doodled the basic architecture of an Internet on the back of an envelope in a hotel lobby in San Francisco; also in 1973, he presented basic Internet ideas with Robert Kahn at an International Network Working Group gathering. In 1974, he published (with Bob Kahn) a paper on Packet Network interconnection that details the design of a Transmission Control Program (TCP). Also in 1974, he published the first technical specification of TCP/IP with Stanford graduate students Yogen Dalal and Carl Sunshine. In 1999, he served as the first chair of the Internet Societal Task Force, formed by ISOC. (Pioneer/Originator.)
Date of prediction: August 1, 1994
Topic of prediction: Information Infrastructure
Subtopic: General
Name of publication: Network World
Title, headline, chapter name: Net Pioneers See No End to Their Grand Experiment; But Global Net Faces Political, Technical Tests
Quote Type: Partial quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
Section: Top News; 25 Arpanet/Internet; Page 1
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney