Next time you find yourself impatient at a one-second buffer while streaming a movie, step back and think for a moment. Even one generation ago, the idea of watching a 4K film with spatial sound on a phone taking data from an “internet” would have seemed pure science fiction. Yet it is not science fiction. It is the legacy of a young mathematician who, as a teenager, once walked inside a giant computer the size of a room and never quite walked out again.
It is all too easy to miss the full sense of wonder that gripped Vint Cerf. The 1950s were an era when science fiction filled boys’ comics and early television screens with giant electronic brains and glowing control rooms. For a fifteen-year-old Vint, the boundary between imagination and reality truly dissolved when he was taken to see the SAGE computer in Santa Monica. As he later recalled, “I was mesmerized.”
That experience was repeated, and indeed intensified, two years later. In 1960 his best friend Steve Crocker managed to obtain weekend access to a Bendix G-15 computer at UCLA. The two teenagers would travel from Van Nuys to program the machine — and, on at least one occasion, climbing through a second-floor window when they found the building locked. They did have permission to use the computer. They simply didn’t have a key to the building. Climbing through an open window was their very teenage solution!
As to what the boys experienced, “It was here,” to quote Vint, “that you could create your own artificial world with software, and it would do what you told it to do… there was something utterly beguiling about this.” For the first time they had entered a realm whose rules were not given by nature or by adults but written by themselves. The machine obeyed without push-back or fatigue. In the age of The Twilight Zone, Flash Gordon and films such as Forbidden Planet (1956), the experience felt less like using a tool and more like being granted the limitless creative power they had seen on television and in the movie theaters.
Back in 1958, when Vint was still only thirteen (blogs are allowed to time-travel), a family friend who worked at the Stanford Research Institute invited him to visit the campus. He met some of the professors and saw the place for himself. He was struck by the beauty of the grounds and by the energetic, intelligent people he encountered. “I really wanted to go there,” he later recalled. From that moment Stanford became Vint’s unstinting goal. In interviews he never mentions seriously considering any other university. That early determination drove him to aim for the grades needed for admission. Once accepted, he competed for, and won, the North American Aviation scholarship that made attendance financially possible.
While pursuing his B.S. in Mathematics, Vint took every computer course the university offered. Although the subject did not yet exist as a formal degree program — and was still very rudimentary — he filled his schedule with every class that touched on computing, determined to deepen the fascination that had begun years earlier. In the end — and somewhat ironically — it was these courses that convinced him he was not cut out for pure mathematics. Programming, by contrast, felt both natural and powerful.
Graduating in 1965, he went straight to IBM in Los Angeles as a systems engineer. It was not the most intellectually demanding environment he could have chosen, nor necessarily the best-paid, but it was the next step in fulfilling his passion. He needed direct experience with real machines and real operating software. The same drive that had once led a teenager to climb through a window to reach a computer now took him into the heart of the largest computing company in the world. He spent the next two years working on the QUIKTRAN time-sharing system and learning how large installations actually behaved.
Two years later, Vint’s high-school friend Steve Crocker, already a graduate student at UCLA, introduced him to Professor Gerald Estrin, who became his thesis advisor and took him on as a research student. Thus, the two friends once again worked side by side — this time as graduate students on the earliest and most critical stages of what would become the ARPANET.
Steve organized the Network Working Group and created the open Request for Comments process; Vint became a principal programmer in the Network Measurement Center and helped design the host-to-host protocols that allowed different machines to understand one another. In roughly three years the project moved from no operational packet-switched network at all to a working national-scale system. The extraordinary nature of this achievement can best be expressed through analogy. It resembles the moment when inert chemical compounds cross the threshold into the first living cell: scattered possibilities suddenly become a self-sustaining, organized whole capable of growth and new behavior. The scale and success of this work is reflected in the fact that this most momentous and critical stage was accomplished in such a short space of time; it took the following decade to complete the further architectural steps that turned a single network into the true Internet.
What had begun years earlier as two teenagers’ fascination with making a single machine obey became the foundation of a network that would, in time, span the globe — and that now delivers a 4K film with spatial sound to the phone in your hand.
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Dr. Anthony O'Sullivan
Palomar Technologies
Senior Director of Strategic Marketing