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I consider high-speed data transmission an invention that became a major innovation. It changed the way we all communicate.

The Connection Machine was the most powerful supercomputer in the world. It is a complex supercomputer and it will take forever to completely describe how it works.

One of the big first computers was called SAGE, which was a missile defense, the first missile-defense computer, which was, like, one of the first computers in the history of the world which got sold to the Department of Defense for, I don't know, tens and tens of millions of dollars at the time.

The idea was that you could grow a system like the Internet one network at a time and then interconnect them. In some sense, the most important thing was the invention of the architecture protocols that enabled the Internet.

In the tech-savvy, real-time world we all live in today, everything is faster.

In the earliest days, this was a project I worked on with great passion because I wanted to solve the Defense Department's problem: it did not want proprietary networking and it didn't want to be confined to a single network technology.

The Internet was developed in large part by U.S. government research funding to develop new communications networks, starting with a network created by the Department of Defense.

One way to get high speed to the home is over cable systems.

I started in time-sharing and networking with packet switching, which was the precursor to what became the Internet. Time-shared use on packet-switch networks, when you think about it, is the cloud.

In the early days of the military Arpanet, my daughter was studying in Nicaragua. Because the U.S. was essentially at war with them, contact was difficult. I managed to use MIT's Arpanet connection, and she found one, so we could communicate thanks to the Pentagon!