Vinton Cerf Quotes (54 Quotes)

Cerf is a wicked smart guy who knows the ins and outs of the internet and internet policies better than anyone,

Of course, I've done small company things, too, but most of them have been nonprofit organizations, such as the Internet Society, and I'm on the board of a number of small companies.

There is an underlying, fundamental reliance on the Internet, which continues to grow in the number of users, country penetration and both fixed and wireless broadband access.

Today we have 1 billion users on the Net. By 2010 we will have maybe 2 billion.

The time is now to think beyond the Earth. Lest you think this is all fantasy, let me assure you that it is quite real.

There's a tremendous amount of energy in Japan and, increasingly, in China.

We live in a very complex world.

Those are all computational engines that are highly distributed and therefore highly robust, ... We're seeing a very significant evolution in the way we even think about computer systems, let alone specific applications.

The purpose behind terrorism is to instill fear in people - the fear that electrical power, for instance, will be taken away or the transportation system will be taken down.

First of all, in terms of investment in Internet-related developments, venture capitalists - once burned - are now very cautious and are investing in areas that actually make business sense.

So, for me, working with larger companies has often been very satisfying, precisely because of the ability of bringing critical mass to bear on a given effort.

Their Internet usage is growing very rapidly, and even they can do the math: If everyone in China needed an IPv4 address - just one - this country would use up one third of the entire public IP address space.

I would agree that the U.S. educational system, especially at the undergraduate and graduate levels, needs some work, but in the meantime, we seem to be cranking out people who are capable,

What is special about VOIP is that it's just another thing you can do on the Internet, whereas it is the only thing - or nearly the only thing with the exception of the dial-up modem and fax - that you can do on the public switched telephone network.

In the larger companies, you have this tendency to get top-down direction.

I was very nervous about going up to teach at Stanford and very nervous even about going to ARPA.

We will have more Internet, larger numbers of users, more mobile access, more speed, more things online and more appliances we can control over the Internet.

This is a place that's just full of creative energy, and I like places like that,

Al Gore actually deserves a lot of credit. In about 1986, he started asking questions like, 'Why don't we take these supercomputers and these optical fiber networks and put them together. Would that do anything' Well, guess what That eventually turned into the National Science Foundation Network, which became a core element of the Internet.

But some people aren't entirely happy with that arrangement. MCI WorldCom Inc. withdrew from the W3C after two years when it concluded that membership wasn't worth 50,000 per year. The structure of the W3C didn't lend itself to quite the degree of freedom to contribute that the IETF does, ... We found it difficult to get points across and to influence what was happening.

There's an old maxim that says, 'Things that work persist,' which is why there's still Cobol floating around.

Yet in all those cases I finally steeled myself to seize the opportunity, and find a way to muddle through and eventually conclude that I had, in fact, chosen the right path, as risky as it seemed at the time.

It's conceivable that the IPN could go like its terrestrial counterpart, starting out as a network supporting scientific research and eventually evolving into something of commercial interest,

If it didn't work, then we couldn't have built the Internet.

But what we all have to learn is that we can't do everything ourselves.

Users will also begin using their mobile devices to control and manage other Internet-enabled appliances (kitchen equipment, entertainment equipments, etc.),

Although I've had several major career changes, I was extremely hesitant about making some of them.

It's Chief Internet Evangelist, which suggests I should go from three-piece suits to some sort of ecclesiastical robes.

Movie distribution may very well have migrated fully to digital form by then, making a huge dent in the need to print film and physically distribute content.

We never, ever in the history of mankind have had access to so much information so quickly and so easily.

Putting in capacity (in a business) that's exponentially growing means putting more capacity than expected so you don't get overrun by demand. You have to stay ahead of it.

There has been a substitution of ideology for fact and scientific and engineering data in this administration.

If you need to understand it to make policy, you should turn first to people who are scientists and engineers for factual information.

At some point, you can't lift this boulder with just your own strength. And if you find that you need to move bigger and bigger boulders up hills, you will need more and more help.

I started thinking about the past 25 years as the Internet evolved, and I thought, 'Gee, what should we be doing now so that in another 25 years, we are ready for whatever's coming'

People need to be exposed to what the various problems are in various parts of the business. And you can become isolated from that in a large company.

avalanche of information that's out there.

There was something amazingly enticing about programming.

The computer would do anything you programmed it to do.

This medium will enjoy wider-spread use than television, radio or phones, and will ultimately expand beyond planet Earth,

In a small company, you often see a lot more of what goes on in a broader range of things. And that's good.

We had no idea that this would turn into a global and public infrastructure.

My reaction to a lot of the current situation that we're in is based in part on a serious concern that the present administration's course ignores reality.

Yet we still see continuous reports of bugs.

I expect to see a lot of household appliances on the Net by 2010, as well as autos and other mobile devices.

Of course, you do have to get accustomed to being satisfied a little bit at second-hand by people who actually do some of the key work.

The Internet lives where anyone can access it.

This is not a new interest for me, ... It's just that I've spent the last decade or so working more on basic Internet infrastructure evolution at MCI. But I've been increasingly interested in focusing back on the application level, higher layer stuff. So this is a wonderful opportunity to pursue that.

In the earliest days, this was a project I worked on with great passion because I wanted to solve the Defense Department's problem: it did not want proprietary networking and it didn't want to be confined to a single network technology.

I'm projecting somewhere between 100 million and 200 million computers on the Net by the end of December 2000, and about 300 million users by that same time.