As Paul Baran passed away this week, we will miss his great inventiveness as well as his warm, humble nature.
Paul was one of the three people who conceptualized packet switching in the early 1960s. There were Len Kleinrock at MIT, Donald Davies in the UK, and Paul at Rand. When I undertook to build the ARPANET in 1967 at Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), I had the advantage of Kleinrock’s book on networks and queuing theory, Davies’s work on packet switching, and Paul’s 11 papers on a secure, reliable command and control network.
Three years earlier, Paul had attempted to get several government agencies to consider his network concept, but he had received no support. He must have been very frustrated to have a great idea but to meet a brick wall. Fortunately for us all, ARPA took the risk; and based on my earlier success with a cross-country packet communication test and Kleinrock’s well proven queuing theory, the technology was finally in hand to move ahead with the first packet network, the ARPANET.
Again, we must recognize Paul for laying the conceptual groundwork.
Paul, however, did not stop working on new ideas and continued to start five companies that expanded the utility of packet switching. Metricom and Ricochet were wireless packet concepts; Com21 built cable modems; GoBackTV was into IPTV; and Plaster Networks provided home and small office networking. His mind continued to generate new ideas throughout his life.
Paul was always lighthearted and never was one to look to claim credit. In his 1999 speech to the CableLabs winter conference he stated: “On occasion, I get accused of creating the notion of the ARPANET. Not guilty!”
What Paul did do as the ARPANET evolved into the Internet was to proceed to use his tremendous inventiveness to extend the Internet to packet wireless and packet cable technology, among other things.
Paul played a strong continuing role in the development of packet technology. We will all miss him.
While we are at it, lets also pay our tribute to Dr. Lawrence Robert. He with his team at ARPA created packet switching and the ARPANet, which then evolved and escalated to become the modern Internet. He also worked on IP flow management with improved Quality of Service for the Internet. He received multiple awards from IEEE, ACM and NEC.
What is most amazing about packet switching is the fact that now, after 20+ years of improvements, modifications, enhancements, and breakthroughs..we are still fundamentally using the same packet switching "protocol" that we started with. What that tell us is that the idea is one of the great ones...as important as the car or telephone. It was because of that original idea that the WWW has gone where it is now. Despite new languages, new site designs, new IP addresses (6 vs 4), and new services...packet switching has remained virtually unchanged. Wow. And yet this guy is all behind the scenes. We've never even heard his name , and he'll get no glory. What a shame. At least we can honor him here. Well deserved!
in that I don't remember ever hearing of him (though I do remember hearing of Kleinrock) and I've been following this stuff for a while. It's sad to say, but it's likely that we're going to see more of this as time marches on. Similarly, we lost Jon Postel a couple of years back. Thanks for telling us about him.
@David: That's a very interesting point! I don't think they publish the names of inventors like T. B. Lee and Paul Baran in text books. Too bad the kids would never get to know of such great personalities.
In school. most of us were taught all about Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell and the Wright Brothers.
But today, with the overwhelming pace of change and the way so many inventions are just building blocks of bigger inventions - it seems like fewer inventors stand out. And even those inventors are known more for their business acumen than their technical skills.
It was nice to read about the role that Mr. Baran played. One can only hope that he relished the large role he played in helping to create this new online world.
What a wonderful and heart-warming tribute to Paul Baran, Dr. Roberts. His contribution to the Internet we now have and take for granted today can be attributed in a big way to him. He will be missed by many.
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