Vint Cerf's talk

Last Thursday, March 2nd, Vint Cerf gave a talk in Dublin. Although it was mainly part of a marketing and recruiting event of Google, it was not something to be missed. How often do you get the chance to see and talk to a “founding father of the TCP/IP stack”?

Fortunately, the talk was fairly technical and Dr Cerf mentioned numerous details on various decisions they (he and Bob Kahn) had to take during the design of the TCP/IP stack and packet switching networking in general. He explained that his main regret is the decision to not include IP addresses at the TCP layer, something that would have eased multihoming and ultimately mobility at the expense of a slightly higher byte overhead. Towards the end of the talk he shared with everyone his obvious passion for space exploration and some highlights of his work on interplanetary network protocols.