I am scheduled to interview Vint Cerf - Vint, in case you haven’t heard of him, invented tcp/ip, worked on the Arpanet, led the engineering of MCI Mail, the first commercial email service to be connected to the Internet, he is now working on the Interplanetary Protocol, together with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It will be a new standard to communicate from planet to planet, using radio/laser communications.
Vint is Chair of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and in Sept. 2005 Google Inc. announced that it hired Cerf as “Chief Internet Evangelist”.
Oh boy!
If you have any questions for Vint - feel free to leave them in the comments of this post and I’ll put them to him in the interview.
Question for Vern Cerf:
(feel free to rephrase)
tcp/ip started out as a single entity.
Then the tcp part was split off to provide an optional reliable transport mechanism on top of unreliable ip. Protocols change for new applications.
How is tcp/ip going to change to cope with 30 minute+ round trip times between planets such as mars and earth?
Is there money in the budget for interactive web sites, so that we can
get near real time updates of discoveries? It would be fascinating to see
a martian sunset or to hear the winds of a martian sandstorm.
Greg,
thanks for the questions - unfortunately the interview was this afternoon so your questions came in a couple of hours too late, sorry.
In good news, Vint did talk about how they have overcome the round trip time problem using interplanetary protocol in the interview.
I expect to publish the interview next Wednesday so stay tuned (or subscribe using iTunes or similar).
Thanks, Tom.