ANDREA SEABROOK, host:
Facebook hoaxes another online high jinx might never have been possible without a couple of guys at an obscure military agency. Twenty-five years ago this week, they switched their employers computers over to a new standard called TCP/IP. Sound dense? Well, that switch on that day suddenly made it possible for small experimental computer networks all over the country to talk to each other. And that made the Internet possible.
The obscure military agency was DARPA — the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. And one of those guys was Vinton Cerf, now commonly called The Father of the Internet. He joins me now.
Hello.
Mr. VINTON CERF (Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist, Google): Oh, hello, Andrea. It's a real pleasure to chat with you.
SEABROOK: First, can you explain to those of us who don't know sort of the inside guts of our computers, what exactly TCP/IP is?
Mr. CERF: First of all, let me say that Robert Kahn, who is also here in Virginia, is the other half of the team that designed the TCP/IP protocols and he, as much I would deserve to be referred to, is fathers of the Internet. Second, what you saw on January 1, 1983 was the culmination of 10 years of work. The first half of which was to define the protocols, the standards, the formats, the conventions of internetwork communication for all the computers that were on these various packet switch networks.
And then in the last five years was implementing the protocols in a variety of operating systems so that people could, in fact, use the design. So what we saw with TCP/IP was the specification of how computers interacted with each other through these multiple nets and the basic architecture of the Internet itself.
SEABROOK: You said something in there - I think I followed you on pretty much all that except the words packet switch networks. I think what you're talking about is how TCP/IP works, right?
Mr. CERF: Well, basically that's a fundamental technology on top of which the TCP/IP design functions. And for your listeners who aren't too familiar with that, the simplest way to describe it is to say that packet switching is like postcards, except they're about a hundred million times faster than the post office works.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. CERF: But they behave the same way. When you put a postcard into the postal service, there's no guarantee it comes out the other end. It's called best-efforts communication. And that's also true of Internet packets. Similarly, if you put two postcards into the postbox, there's no guarantee that the recipient gets them in the same order that you put them in. And that's also true of Internet packets. And so the TCP, your transmission control protocol, is what keeps everything in order, and the IP layer, the internet protocol, is what actually delivers things from the source to the destination.
SEABROOK: Vint Cerf, back in the late '70s and early '80s, what problem were you solving when you created this? I mean, were you envisioning the Internet when you installed this new computer protocol?
Mr. CERF: Well, it would be a long story to say exactly what we were thinking, but in short terms, yes, we understood a lot of what was happening or what could happen with this technology. We knew it was very powerful. Whether we envision what the world would be like with a billion users, I think, it would arguably, no, we didn't really. But the basic problem we were solving is that the military needed to be able to use satellite radio and wire-line computer networks in order to use computers and to man the control.
And so we had to find a way of taking a variety of very different kinds of computer networks and connect them together in such a way that the computers at the - on each of those networks saw just a common and rather uniform system despite the diversity of the underlining computer networks.
SEABROOK: Vinton Cerf helps create the Internet communication standard TCP/IP. He's now at Google as the company's - this is his title - vice president and chief Internet evangelist.
Thank you very much for joining us, sir.
Mr. CERF: Thanks so much, Andrea. I appreciate the chance to chat.