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VC: Ironically, there’s a 40th anniversary hiding in here because Bob [Robert Kahn] and I did the original design work between March and September of 1973, so for us this year is the 40th anniversary. We turned it on on Jan. 1, 1983, but 10 years earlier we began the actual work and it took us five years to iterate through implementation designs, fix repair design and another five years to get enough of this stuff implemented on enough operating systems to tell everybody on the experimental ARPAnet that they had to switch over to the new Internet protocols so that we could build multi-network systems.

So for me, I can’t speak for Bob, walking into shows like CES, seeing the enormous mutually reinforcing power of mobile and appliance technology connected to the Internet is pretty amazing. These devices are already pretty smart by any reasonable estimate, but the fact that they can reach the Internet and exercise control over huge resources that are on the network, interact with them, ignite them, makes them mutually reinforcing.

We have a cohort of people who want to stay connected to each other, especially as they get older

FP:You’re going to be speaking at the Silvers Summit here at CES. What do you plan to speak about during your keynote?

VC: Several things. First of all I’m going to point out that not only does our silver community know how to use this stuff, some of us invented it. So let’s not sell the older population short.

It is a very large and increasing population here in [North America] and therefore should not be ignored, and second, these folks are very creative users of new technology. Not all of them, plainly. But what you discover is that we have a cohort of people who want to stay connected to each other, especially as they get older.