A Slight Oversight

Once again, Vint Cerf didn’t mention the ARPANET, the packet-switched (as distinct from circuit-switched) technical foundation upon which the Internet was based. In grad school Cerf had early exposure to the ARPANET, but he was not one of the visionaries behind it.

Vint’s significance in the development of TCP/IP can’t be overstated. He is a legendary development programmer, and as he says he approached the Internet as an engineering challenge. Cerf should give credit for the vision where it’s due, and that should certainly include the late Bob Taylor, one of the originators of the ARPANET project.

Cerf and Kahn started working at DARPA in 1973, after Taylor got the ARPANET going and had left for Xerox PARC. Taylor headed up the Alto project, which was the thing that blew Steve Job’s mind by having a GUI with a mouse, an early version of Ethernet, laser printers, and e-mail. After Xerox, Taylor moved on to Digital Equipment Corporation.

At DEC, Bob leveraged Tim Berners-Lee’s invention of the Worldwide Web by coming up with AltaVista, the powerful search engine that was influential on a startup called Google. Since 99.999% of everybody thinks the Web is the Internet, rather than the biggest part of it, an occasional mention of Tim by Vint would also be appropriate.

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