Reminder: It’s neat covering a technology when its inventors are still around to talk about it
Friday afternoon had me in the audience at a tech event watching two older computer scientists discuss their work. That could be interesting in a variety of contexts, but it wasn’t just any two life-experienced CS types speaking at Project Liberty’s Summit on the Future of the Internet: Steve Crocker and Vint Cerf are pivotal to the Internet’s past, having helped to create the thing.
It’s not a given that most of the developers of a technology prototyped in 1969 would still be around to talk about it in 2024, but they are here and so here we are. Which means that every time I get to see any of these Internet pioneers talk about what they helped to give the world, I realize what a treat that is.
Nobody writing about aviation or electricity or cars or rockets today has that kind of privilege, and people writing about the Internet 20 years from now almost certainly won’t either.
In Cerf’s case, that privilege has happened reasonably often over the years—including a few extended interviews and one panel I did with the co-designer of the Internet’s TCP/IP foundation at a Google event in D.C. in 2011.
Two weeks ago, I had a similar experience at Web Summit in Lisbon when my Fast Company editor Harry McCracken asked if I’d like to join him for a meeting with Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. No other communications platform has been as important to my work as the Web, so of course I’d make time for that. My reply to Harry: “Excellent. When at?”
I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Sir Tim (Queen Elizabeth II knighted him in 2004 in recognition of his work) a few times before then. Among them, I keep thinking back to one such occasion in 2009, a fancy reception at the Finnish Embassy at which he was one of the speakers. I said hello to the man afterwards and thanked him for giving me something to write about all these years; he said with his typical modesty something like “Oh, I’m sure you would have found other things to write about.”
When Harry met Berners-Lee for the first time at Web Summit two years ago—somehow that had not happened before, despite my editor being a walking encyclopedia of computing history—he, too, thanked Sir Tim for inventing the Web. His equally gracious reply: “You’re very welcome—use it any time you like.”
My industry has its share of jerks, but these guys aren’t among them.
#Humblebrag #InternetFoundingFathers #InternetInventors #InternetPioneers #SirTim #SteveCrocker #TBL #TimBernersLee #VintCerf #WorldWideWeb
