During school assembly yesterday, students had the opportunity to meet and listen to Vinton Cerf, one of the two men credited with creating the Internet.

Cerf has won many awards including the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Turing Award, an annual computer science award, for his help designing the Internet, or the ARPANet as it was known back in the 1970s. He is currently working as the Chief Internet Evangelist at Google and is very active on public policy concerning the Internet.

Much of the reason for his coming was due to the work of Zina Jawadi (11). She has been putting an emphasis on disability awareness at school, starting with her own affliction: hearing disability. Since both Cerf and his wife are hearing impaired, his visit to the school tied into her awareness campaign.

“Honestly, the results of the assembly were extraordinarily successful, and I hope that Harker students’ and faculty’s perspective on hearing loss and appreciation of hearing loss has expanded,” Zina said. “Seeing Harker so positively affected by someone who is my inspiration and my hero makes me proud, thrilled, and enthralled.”

The speech left students engaged by its inclusion of cutting edge technology in the form of the interplanetary Internet, which Cerf is working on, and Internet enabled surfboards.

For computer science teacher Richard Page, the speech brought back memories when the Internet was first invented.

“I had the opportunity to meet both Dr. Cerf and Dr. [Bob] Kahn in 1973 with a college group up from Los Angeles, and it’s something that I will never forget,” Page said. “Hearing about the very beginnings of the Internet, it was just very exciting. So for me, it’s like, ‘wow look what has happened in the 40 years from [then].’”

Page, like many of his fellow teachers, enjoyed how the topics of the speech could to the subject matter.

After his speech, a few students, such as seniors Kevin Susai and Neel Bhoopalam, stayed back into class time to ask questions or take a picture with Cerf.

“[With] his vast amount of knowledge, he could have made [the speech] in a boring way,” Kevin said. “But he found a way that was easily understandable to us as high schoolers, and that’s what made it so interesting and made me stay a couple minutes later to ask a couple of questions.”

Neel, who stayed to talk to Cerf with Kevin, was especially interested in the role Google played in the Internet.

“It was a great experience getting to meet him,” he said. “He knows so much about a lot of different topics. We asked him one question, but he was able to go on and relate it to something else and talk about a different topic, which was just as fascinating, so I thought that was really cool.”

According to several students, Cerf’s speech was memorable not only for its technological subject matter, but also for its dose of humor.

In one of his most witty lines, Cerf talked about Internet enabled bathroom scales, which send the users’ weight to the doctor. He noted that there was “one [possible] problem: your refrigerator is on the same network. So you get home and you see diet recipes [on the screen] or maybe it just refuses to open.”

Although Cerf was originally invited to talk about hearing impairment, he ended up giving students an engaging talk about not only disability but also current innovations in the world.