Vint Cerf: "The Internet Today" lecture at Strelka

[[email protected]]

The Internet is constantly evolving. Forty years ago, I was a graduate student at Caltech, working on software to connect a computer called Sigma-7 to the first node of the ARPANET. The network was being built by the U.S. Department of Defense as an experiment to test packet switching technology. In 1979, people thought packet switching was a dumb idea. Communications worked differently back then, and the phone companies didn’t think the U.S. was interested in the technology. But they agreed to provide the links for the tests.

The main goal of the Network was to study how computing resources could be shared among the many universities participating in the project. At its inception, ARPANET consisted of only 4 nodes. By 1972, it had about 35 nodes, mostly in the United States, but some were already in Europe.

Over the next 30 years, the Internet grew to gigantic proportions, nurses email database but at its core it remained a network of networks: independent, decentralized.

In the first decade, the number of computers connected to the Internet grew approximately twofold every year, in the last 20 years - twofold every 5-6 years, but this is only the number of visible machines. There are many corporate, office or university networks in the world that are behind firewalls and are not visible to external users. By 2010, there were already 2 billion users on the Internet, although the number of visible machines was approximately 800 million. But the number of mobile users is growing even faster - there are already more than 4.5 billion in the world. And for many people, their first acquaintance with the Internet, and sometimes the only device from which they can go online, is a mobile phone. It is important for people and companies whose business is connected to the Internet to understand how to provide their services, taking into account the limitations of mobile devices.

People sometimes ask me what I would change if I could go back in time. I have to admit that I made some serious mistakes when we were choosing how many values ​​we would need for the network address space. But you have to understand that we were just conducting an experiment. In 1974, when our scientific paper came out, we didn’t even dream of what our brainchild would turn into. Some of the engineers suggested using 128-bit addresses, but we thought, why so many? Even 32 bits give us 4.3 billion unique addresses, and we hardly need that many. Everyone thought they were conducting an experiment, but it didn’t end there. So now we have to introduce IPv6, which has an address space of 128 bits. Another important point that we missed was the security of data transmission on the network. Unfortunately, when we created TCP/IP, all the basic technologies of this kind were classified. We later learned that during those same years, scientists like Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman were working on the idea of ​​public-key cryptography. Fortunately, the principles of TCP/IP later allowed for the development and implementation of secure versions of the protocols, such as HTTPS.

I would like to note that I have great respect for the Russian scientific community, which has made a great contribution to the development of the Internet. 20 years ago, scientists, employees of the Kurchatov Institute, took the first steps towards deploying networks in Russia. People such as Evgeny Velikhov, Alexey Platonov, Alexey Soldatov created the RELCOM, GLASNET, USENET networks and continue to work on the development of the Internet to this day. Thus, since 2004, the academic community of Russia has been actively supporting the development of the GLORIAD scientific network, designed for speeds of up to 100 Gbit/sec. GLORIAD covers the entire northern hemisphere and unites many universities and scientific institutions. International cooperation is key to the progress of the Internet, because no one can implement such a project alone. And the fact that President Medvedev is so keenly interested in modern technologies is wonderful! It is much worse when it is the other way around, as was the case in America under the previous administration.