A biography for Vint Cerfhasn’t been written yet.
“Writing software is a very intense, very personal thing. You have to have time to work your way through it, to understand it. Then debug it.”
“Some people argue we should solve all the problems on Earth before going off the planet, but that's like telling Lewis and Clark to stay put until the rest of the East was settled. No way.”
“At the roots, people are still people. That's why Shakespeare is so popular no matter what the language.”
“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 want more Internet. I want every one of the 6 billion people on the planet to be able to connect to the Internet - I think they will add things to it that will really benefit us all.”
“I think exploring the Internet's - and the Web's - ability to facilitate personal linkages is remarkable; and expect to see additional social networking applications and services emerge.”
“We all know the Internet didn't explode until it became a commercial enterprise. Space communication will probably have the same characteristic.”
“I wore a coat and tie all through high school: my way of being rebellious in the late 1950s.”
“Virtually any appliance is going to be online. Appliances will talk to each other and to the power-generation system. Our appliances will pay attention to our preferences.”
“For systems in which you already have a lot of hardware and software, change is difficult. That's why apps are so popular.”
“Yet we still see continuous reports of bugs.”
“In the larger companies, you have this tendency to get top-down direction.”
“There's nothing special about wireless networks except that wireless capacity is sometimes less than what you can get, for example, from optical fiber.”
“In a town of 3,000 people, there is no privacy. Everybody knows what everybody is doing.”
“You don't have to be young to learn about technology. You have to feel young.”
“Google Apps for Education is a suite of applications intended to be helpful to higher level educational institutions, but in the long run, I think Google has a role to play in helping to assemble relevant content for classroom use.”
“We've never lived in an environment in which it has been so easy to capture information and share it. That fact that it is digital and easy to transmit exacerbates that. I don't know that we know yet what social norms we wish to adopt.”
“By 1988, I'm seeing this commercial phenomenon beginning to show up. Hardware makers are selling routers to universities so they can build up their campus networks. So I remember thinking, 'Well, how are we going to get this in the hands of the general public?' There were no public Internet services at that point.”
“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.”
“There is an odd mix of permeability and impermeability in the Net. You won't be able to communicate with everyone, and not every application will be accessible to everyone.”