Forest pupils visit Stationers’ Hall

Old Forester and Master of The Stationers’ Company Ian Bennett invited the Acting Warden, Marcus Cliff Hodges, and a group of Forest’s recent Y13 leavers to attend a talk in the magnificent Stationers’ Hall given by Vint Cerf, widely known as one of the ‘Fathers of the Internet’.

Cerf is known to people in the IT and Digital worlds as the co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols and the architecture of the Internet.

He gave a fascinating talk about how he and his colleagues developed the internet and then turned to where it is today and where he sees it going, raising the question of the net’s long term survival and whether we are heading for a digital ‘Dark Age’?

The talk finished by Cerf telling the audience about his vision for the Google of the future, after which he answered questions (including those posed by our Forest pupils) and chatted informally to John Duffet, Faizan Mohamed, John Pham and Faisal Patel.