Nick McKeown with Glenn Zorpette - VICS Honors 2021

You get to come along on a whirlwind tour of the ancient history of the world wide web when IEEE Spectrum Executive Editor Glenn Zorpette has a virtual sit-down with Internet legend Nick McKeown.

Nick McKeown is active in the software-defined networking (SDN) movement, which he helped start with Scott Shenker and Martin Casado. SDN and OpenFlow arose from the PhD work of Casado at Stanford University, where he was a student of McKeown. OpenFlow is a novel programmatic interface for controlling network switches, routers, WiFi access points, cellular base stations and WDM/TDM equipment. OpenFlow challenged the vertically integrated approach to switch and router design of the past twenty years. McKeown works closely with Guru Parulkar, Executive Director of the Stanford Open Network Research Centre (ONRC) and the Open Networking Lab (ON.Lab). In 2011, McKeown and Shenker co-founded the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) to transfer control of OpenFlow to a newly created not-for-profit organization.