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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.

What we figured out was that in order to get everyone in the world to have basic access to the Internet, that's a problem that's probably billions of dollars. Or maybe low tens of billions. With the right innovation, that's actually within the range of affordability.

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.

What the Internet is great at is building networks.

One of the things that is not so good is that a decision was made long ago about the size of an IP address - 32 bits. At the time it was a number much larger than anyone could imagine ever having that many computers but it turned out to be to small.

When I was born, the Internet was barely two years old. It was the preserve of academics, used to connect dozens rather than billions of users. There weren't many who predicted it would transform our world.

The Internet is not just one thing, it's a collection of things - of numerous communications networks that all speak the same digital language.

The Internet was crucial for our success. It is a great thing. It is a big democracy because people can choose what they like.

The Internet has created an incredible democratization of the architecture industry.

The first wave of the Internet was really about data transport. And we didn't worry much about how much power we were consuming, how much cooling requirements were needed in the data centers, how big the data center is in terms of real estate. Those were almost afterthoughts.