From:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk:80/et?ac=001036222020742&rtmo=0G2KxGXq&atmo=kkkkkkku&P4_FOLLOW_ON=/98/12/24/ecfcerf24.html&pg=/et/98/12/24/ecfcerf24.html
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Internet pioneer sets sights on new worlds to conquer
The fact that it has taken 20 years to put the terrestrial Net on its feet has prompted Vinton Cerf to start looking ahead on an interplanetary scale. He talks to Wendy Grossman
VINTON Cerf was 10 years old when he became an avid science-fiction fan, and you could say that he's been living in his own SF novel ever since. Now the man most often given the sobriquet of "father of the Internet" is turning his attention outwards - to the planets.
Along with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and other prominent researchers,
Cerf is working on a project to develop the protocols that will be needed
for an interplanetary Internet. It is, he says, the fact
that TCP/IP has taken 20 years to get from drawing board protocol to
worldwide mass medium that tells him it's time to think about what will
be needed in 20 years.
As an aside, he comments that attempts to revamp the system by which computers are assigned human-friendly names are thinking too small: what about .earth, .moon and .mars?
Mars is getting most of the immediate attention. This year's Pathfinder
mission is due to be followed up by efforts to map the planet's surface,
with a launch in 2001 and more at 26-month intervals thereafter. Other
missions will visit Saturn in 2004 and Pluto in 2010, and Cerf is
committed to looking at the technology that will be needed, not just for
those missions but for manned space stations. Part of his
preparation has been returning to some of his favourite Mars authors:
Ben Bova, Ray Bradbury, Kim Stanley Robinson and Robert Heinlein.
"I enjoy the escape," he says, adding that in the long term, "I think it's also made it easier for me to think about things that weren't quite ready yet but I could imagine might just possibly be feasible."
Cerf's "father of the Internet" tag came from his stint at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency from 1976 to 1982, when he and his colleague Robert Kahn developed TCP/IP, the protocols that enable all types of computers everywhere to link together and form the Internet.
He moved on to MCI, where in the early 1980s he built the first commercial
email system to be connected to the Internet, and then served as vice-president
of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives. In 1994 he rejoined
MCI, which this year merged into MCI WorldCom, where
he is senior vice-president of Internet architecture and engineering.
He is also chairman of the Internet Society and winner of many awards,
including the US National Medal of Technology and the Marconi
Fellowship, and serves as a member of Ireland's Telecommunications
Advisory Committee. Clearly, he hasn't suffered as a result of growing
up reading science fiction in an era when it was not only frowned on by
parents but looked at askance by other kids.
Cerf remembers it was 1986 before anyone made any money out of the Internet, and then it was the router manufacturers. "Up until then," he says, "the only way to build a router was to find a computer and wrap a graduate student around it." In 1988, he realised the Net couldn't get any bigger unless it became commercial and self-sustaining, so as a one-year experiment he and his colleagues connected MCIMail in 1989. "As soon as we announced it, everyone else selling commercial email said they had to be connected, and after that no one disconnected," he says.
All this serves as a reminder that the commercial Internet is still less than four years old; that's why everyone's business models are so confused. "In a gold rush, people make money not by looking for gold but by selling picks and shovels to other people looking for gold," he says.
This might explain how he ended up working for one of those outfits the Net loathes: a telephone company. "A lot of us are working for the phone companies," he says, "because a lot of Internet companies are being bought by telcos. In order to continue to grow the Internet, it has to be part of a system that actually has its own capacity."
Part of his job is projecting the demands of Net growth (he predicts 300 million users by 2000) and new technologies, from Internet radio and video to high-speed connections and wireless networks. There are, he says, some wild ideas out there, including a scheme to use blimps to provide connectivity.
Interplanetary links sound almost sensible, but creating the necessary technology won't be simple. TCP/IP is unsuitable: the protocol was designed to be robust, but not to handle the long delays inherent in the vast distances of space. Even at the speed of light, information would take as long as 24 minutes to get from Earth to Mars when they are farthest apart, which makes our complaints about the "World-Wide Wait" seem a bit, er, terrestrial.
Compressing data and transmitting it quickly is, however, something
of a Nasa speciality, so one concept that's being considered is interplanetary
gateways that would hook the terrestrial Internet to the deep-space networks
that develop, much as CompuServe and AOL have different (proprietary) systems
that require gateways now. Other techniques under discussion include protocols
for minimising the amount of data that has to be sent, perhaps by relaying
only changes to previously transmitted data instead of the whole pile all
over again.
Two other founding fathers of the World Wide Web
Jon Postel, who died in October, was a networking specialist at the University of Southern California's Information Systems Institute and the brains behind much of the Internet's functioning. He wrote many of the documents that defined the standards that make Internet functions such as email work. He's probably best known for devising the domain name system and allocating the numbered Internet addresses for which domain names serve as a human-friendly interface.
At his memorial service, the US governemnt electronic commerce adviser Ira Magaziner told the story of Postel's arrival at the White House this summer, wearing shorts, sandals and a guru-like white beard. The Secret Service took 20 minutes to let him join suited men waiting for him. And yet, said Magaziner, in 200 years Postel will be the only one in that room who is remembered.
Tim Berners-Lee, a British physicist, designed the World Wide Web in 1991 during a sojourn at the CERN particle accelerator in Switzerland to make it easier to share information with colleagues. He now heads the World Wide Web Consortium, an independent group at the Massachussets Institute of Technology Computer Science Laboratory that guides the development of the web.
Current projects include extending the language in which web pages are written to make them machine-readable (XML) and making the web friendlier for the disabled.
One part of Berners-Lee's original vision still remains to be implemented:
he intended the Web to be fully interactive, and designed the first graphical
browser accordingly. Using it, you could browse the
Web in one window and create your own pages in a second, automatically
drawing in the material from the pages you found.
dan@southeast.net
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