Written by I saw the man who invented the internet today… and no, it was not Al Gore. It was Vint Cerf, former Department of Defense engineer and currently Google’s Internet Evangelist, who spoke at a luncheon sponsored by Seattle’s Technology Alliance. Our fair city of Renton had a delegation of nine managers, to learn all we could from this pioneer of computing. I was very impressed by Mr. Cerf’s command of technology, vision, sense of humor, the work he put into moving the original 4000 computers onto the system in 1983, and how he was able to devise a system back in 1983 that now accommodates half a billion computers….talk about scalable.
Relative to privacy in the new technology world, he said the flippant answer is “There is no privacy, get over it”. With face recognition, cameras everywhere, cell phones taking video and uploading it in seconds, etc, we need to get used to a world where all our movement and actions in the community are available forever. But at the same time, he and other computer geniuses really are trying to work on improved to keep our medical, banking, and other private records private.
I took many of my own notes to write a story for you. But Seattle PI blogger John Cook did such a good job describing the event, that I can cover most of it by just providing this link.
Father of the Internet . . . .
. . . not “inventor” is what he’s called. Before you got there, Governor Gregoire had a humorous moment during her introduction when said she had the opportunity to introduce “the inventor of the Internet” and started calling “Al? Al Gore? Where are you?”
The PI Blog report is excellent and captures the event nicely.