Why the father of the internet is supporting this start-up

Heidelberg. Vinton Cerf is a man for transformative technologies. In the early 1970s, the US computer scientist published the first version of the Internet Protocol. Looking back, he calls the vision of allowing machines in Los Angeles to interact with machines in Boston "seductive". Today, he has long been thinking in much larger dimensions: An "interplanetary extension" should enable Internet connections in space.

Meanwhile, the 82-year-old is supporting a young company that aims to help a technology as disruptive as his invention achieve new breakthroughs: The start-up ExpectedIT is working on a server architecture that makes the development of artificial intelligence faster and cheaper.

What Vinton Cerf still has in common with the founders is the location of the company founded in 2021: Esslingen am Neckar. Vinton Cerf studied just 15 kilometres away in the early 1960s: Stanford University had a branch in the village of Beutelsbach at the time. Handelsblatt met the Internet pioneer and ExpectedIT CEO Burkhard Steinmacher-Burow for a double interview in Heidelberg. Cerf said: "I have the feeling that today we are building the science fiction that I devoured 50 years ago."

Read the full interview here

Mr Cerf, Mr Steinmacher-Burow, today we want to talk about two digital revolutions: One began with the invention of the internet 50 years ago and has changed the way we do business, communicate and learn over the past few decades. We expect the other to bring similarly profound changes. You, Mr Cerf, are not only a contemporary witness to the Internet revolution, you are even considered one of its fathers. Is that an accurate description?
Vinton Cerf: Yes, that's it. Bob Kahn and I developed the original design in 1973. But we were smart enough to say: we can only do this if people who are even smarter than us are involved. And therein lay the success - we found people who wanted to realise this project.

The computer scientist Robert Elliot Kahn and you pursued an idea that sounded almost crazy at the time: computers should be able to communicate with each other over any distance.
Cerf: I remember sitting at Stanford and imagining a computer in Los Angeles interacting with a computer in Boston - and eventually, of course, with one here in Heidelberg or anywhere else in the world. That was tempting.

Can you explain in very simple terms what exactly your contribution was?
Cerf: You can imagine that Bob Kahn and I wanted to design a kind of road network for computers on which vehicles could drive. So we had to set rules: Build your cars and lorries no wider, longer or higher than this dimension - and no heavier. If you stick to these rules, you can use our roads. And by the way: please only drive on one side of the road at a time.

How does the whole thing work technically?
Cerf: The Internet is essentially about "packet switching", i.e. packet-switched communication. You can imagine such a packet as a postcard: It has a recipient address, a sender address and a content, i.e. something like the greeting on the card. Everything you know about postcards also applies to Internet packets.