I ran into Vint Cerf, who didn’t know me of course, but I knew him. So I boldly introduced myself, and Vint said, “Hey, you wanna come to dinner?” And I said, “Well yes, please.” So he shoved me into a cab…
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When I started, of course, there was no capital‑I Internet. There were, however, eventually a bunch of smaller networks that didn’t talk to each other, and I decided that they needed to talk to each other at least for email.
One of the things that we have discovered over and over again, as we build networks that move electrons around and photons around, is that human beings use those to connect with one another. We think we’re connecting computers together, it turns out we’re connecting human beings together.
Although many may not recognize his name, most people today are very familiar with the foundational technology that Doug Engelbart pioneered beginning in the 1960s.
Since my early years, I was sure that information technology would really bring the world together through the Internet. My story of success started many years back when I started by helping build networks for universities, being among the first women engineers to work with the Kenya Educational Network
I was hired to build a supercomputer access network. or a set of networks for supercomputer access. The reason I took the job was that I saw an opportunity to do something much bigger in that.
It’s an honor for me to be here. It’s an undeserved honor for me. But I am proud to be a tiny bit of this construction, this marvelous construction that the Internet is and keeps being.
When I started in 1991, I was a hired gun. I was brought in to create a network, a pan-European network, and I was going to do it for three years. Twenty-three years later I’m still involved in the same thing.
I want to just make a few remarks about mentors and protectors. Most of us here have needed either or both of those. So I want to talk about two people in particular without whom I wouldn’t be here. The first person you know, and the second person you almost surely don’t know.
I came along in the early 1990s to join the Internet development community, at a time when this work was cultivated by a mix of academia, government, and industry. And it was really starting to flourish, and the growth of the Net was starting to explode at that point with two to three new countries joining you know, every every month or two with their full TCP/IP connections.