Leaders in Computing

5 CERF’S UP

Vint Cerf, December 2006

For a series of interviews with key figures in the IT industry for BCS’s 50th anniversary, Brian Runciman spoke to Vint Cerf, Google’s chief web evangelist.

What developments in computing do you think were the most groundbreaking or memorable in the last 50 years?

We’ve gone from simple switching in the phone system to tubes to transistors to ICs, and that sequence has had a profound effect. It’s produced powerful, small devices using very little power.

Sometimes people think Moore’s Law has been outgrown and pursue new technology like gallium arsenide, but we keep finding yet more ways to tweak CMOS technology to make it run faster with less power, and its potential isn’t exhausted yet. We will eventually ...