How Internet Pioneers Celebrated 50 Years of the Internet

Founded in 1963, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers held a special event Sunday that they said would be "inspiring engineering for the next 50 years." The event featured talks on the origins of the internet from 80-year-old "father of the internet" Vint Cerf, along with John Shoch (who helped develop the Ethernet and internetwork protocols at Xerox PARC), Judith Estrin (who worked with Cerf on the TCP project), and Robert Kahn (who with Cerf first proposed the IP and TCP protocols). Ethernet co-inventor Bob Metcalfe also spoke at the end of the event. Long-time Slashdot reader repett0 was an onsite volunteer, and shares that "it was incredible to meet and greet such a wonderful mix of people making technology happen... [T]he event celebrated many key technologies and innovators from the past 50 years and considerations of what is to come in the next 50 years." Video streams are available and more are coming online (including interviews with key innovators, society leadership, and more). If you could not make this event event, follow-on activities continue, including the People-Centered Internet Imagine Workshop where a mix of society is working together to consider how to improve humanity's intersection with ever-expanding abilities thanks to technology. They add that the event was made possible "through the collaboration of many professional computing societies" including the IEEE, People-Centered Internet, Google, Internet Society, IEEE Computer Society, GIANT Protocol, IEEE Foundation - and volunteers from the SF Bay Area ACM and Internet Society.

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