Vinton G. Cerf at Norway’s IT Award Ceremony

November 21, 2007
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How would you like the chance to go through Internet history and even meet one of it’s inventors, and have a nice chat with him – all in one day? Well last night I did, and since my blog is about my daily life, mostly in Norway, I’ll gladly share this exciting moment with you:

Yesterday it was The Norwegian Computer Society‘s big event: ROSING, The IT Award Ceremony 2007 in Oslo. You can read all about last years event where I met the co-founder of Skype, Morten Lund in my ‘IT’s all about luck‘ post. As I said then: Awards are given out in categories like “IT Security”, “Usability”, “Competence”, “Creativity”, “Best Net Service” e.g. to software companies, consultants, organization or others that have provided some special and good solutions within IT and the Internet. This years key note speaker was no less that the father of the Internet himself; Vinton G. Cerf:

Vinton G. Cerf at ROSING 2007In his speech: ‘The Internet – Past, Present and Future’, Mr. Cerf took us through the history and development of the Internet from how it started in the beginning of the 60s with DARPA to ARPANET in the 70s where the Internet matured as a result of the TCP/IP architecture first proposed by Robert E. Kahn at BBN and further developed by Kahn and Cerf at Stanford and others throughout the 70’s. He also gave some facts and figures about the spreading and growth of the net and how he became VP and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google. I would like to stress on one crucial point though: Beside the protocol in itself, one of the most import factors for how the Internet has been created, is the design goals for this interconnection of networks:
• Any network should be able to connect to any other network via a gateway
• There should be no central network administration or control
• Lost packets should be retransmitted
• No internal changes in the networks should be needed in order to enable their interconnection.

So here we are, in a free network, where everyone can participate and share applications, informations and knowledge like in this wonderful world of Blogshpere where it really shows that it empowering people.

Vinton G. Cerf and RennyBABefore Vint’s speech, I was lucky to have a nice chat with him. He knew a lot of people important for the development of the net, including Norwegians like Paal Spilling, professor at the Department of informatics, Univ. of Oslo and University Graduate Center at Kjeller. I said I thought Spilling was the first one who connected to ARPANET outside of US, but Vint meant it was Professor Peter Kirstein of University College London (UCL). I promised i would try to find out more information about it and get back to him.
I also told Mr. Cerf that I would like to see him nominated for 2008 Nobel Peace Price like I announced in my post in October. He was flattered of course and said if so, Mr. Robert Kahn should be included too. I also like the idea of adding Tim Berners-Lee who wrote the protocol for information distribution known as WWW. Those three have provided some really important tools for free information availably which breaks down religious, cultural and social barriers in the world. I still am working on that and take it you support me :-)

Habits, History
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