WHEN THE INTERNET MOURNS ITS FATHER

Paul Baran; April 29, 1926 – March 26, 2011.

Great men continue to pass through the sands of time, exceptional personalities who believe in their dream and pursed it with all fervency. They are more than mere men, they reigned not with men of little means, NAY they walked with the titans. You are about to enter the world of such...

TIMELINE

In 1961, at the height of the Cold War, an engineer named Paul Baran was said to have sold the idea of a failure-resistant communications method called packet switching to the US Department of Defense. But because of bureaucratic roadblocks at AT&T and the Pentagon, it wasn't until the 1970s that the technology was finally adopted as the foundation architecture of the Arpanet - the precursor to the Internet. Paul Baran conceived the Internet's architecture at the height of the Cold War. Forty years later, he says the Net's biggest threat wasn't the USSR - it was the phone company.

As of the time when he approached AT&T with the idea to build his proposed network, Paul’s invention was so far ahead of its time that in the mid-1960s, AT&T insisted it would not work and refused to advance any move about it. AT&T repeatedly said his idea wouldn’t work, and wouldn’t participate in the Arpanet project.

In 1959 he joined Rand, which had been established in 1946 to do military research for the US Air Force. In the early 1960s, while working at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, Calif., Mr. Baran outlined the fundamentals for packaging data into discrete bundles, which he called “message blocks.” The bundles are then sent on various paths around a network and reassembled at their destination. Such a plan is known as “packet switching.” Mr. Baran’s idea was to build a distributed communications network, less vulnerable to attack or disruption than conventional networks. By the late 1950s, RAND Corporation , was at the centre of nuclear politics and strategy. An issue of great concern at this time was the vulnerability of US military communications to a nuclear strike from Russia. If the command-and-control network was destroyed, the ability of the US to retaliate would be threatened.

Baran invented a futuristic solution to this problem in the form of a network held together by scores of small computers. Messages would be passed ("like a hot potato") from one computer to the next towards its destination. Even if the network was massively damaged, the message would still get through. Another innovation was to chop all messages into small blocks so that they would not be delayed by long messages clogging the network. The blocks would arrive at their destination in a random order via different routes, and the computer at the destination end would reconstitute the original messages from the individual blocks.

In a series of technical papers published in the 1960s he suggested that networks be designed with redundant routes so that if a particular path failed or was destroyed, messages could still be delivered through another. “Paul wasn’t afraid to go in directions counter to what everyone else thought was the right or only thing to do,” said Vinton Cerf, a vice president at Google who was a colleague and longtime friend of Mr. Baran’s.

However, it was not until 1969, that the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency built the Arpanet, a network that used Mr. Baran’s ideas, and those of others. The Arpanet was eventually replaced by the Internet, and packet switching still lies at the heart of the network’s internal workings.

BIO.

Paul Baran, was a Polish American engineer who was a pioneer in the development of computer networks. He was one of the three earliest researchers of packet switching techniques, and went on to start several companies and develop other technologies that are an essential part of the Internet and other modern digital communication. He was born in Grodno, Poland (which is now in Belarus) on April 29, 1926.He was the youngest of three children in a Jewish family, with the Yiddish given name "Pesach".

His family moved to the United States in 1928,by settling in Boston and later in Philadelphia, where his father, Morris "Moshe" Baran (1884–1979), opened a grocery store. He graduated from Drexel University in 1949 (then called Drexel Institute of Technology), with a degree in electrical engineering. He then joined the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Company, where he did technical work on UNIVAC models, the first brand of commercial computers in the USA. In 1955 he married Evelyn Murphy

Baran would later received the Franklin Institute's 2001 Bower Award and Prize for Achievement in Science, his latest in a string of prestigious honors from professional organizations including the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and NEC. Over a lifetime of quietly sustained achievement as inventor and entrepreneur, Baran cofounded the Institute for the Future and created a series of successful companies -Cabledata Associates, Packet Technologies, Metricom, Interfax, and Com21 - based on technologies he developed. As corporations like Cisco acquired his businesses, Baran's inventions went mainstream: His discrete multitone technology is at the heart of DSL, and his developments in spread spectrum transmission are essential to the ongoing wireless explosion.

According to Gerald Estrin, who was Mr. Baran’s adviser, said Mr. Baran was the first student he ever had who actually went to the Patent Office in Washington to investigate whether his master’s work, on character recognition, was patentable. “From that day on, my expectations of him changed,” Dr. Estrin said. “He wasn’t just a serious student, but a young man who was looking to have an effect on the world.”

DEATH

Baran died in Palo Alto, California at the age of 84 on March 26, 2011.He died due to complications from lung cancer. Upon his death James Thomson, the president of RAND stated that "Our world is a better place for the technologies Paul Baran invented and developed, and also because of his consistent concern with appropriate public policies for their use.”One of the fathers of the internet, Vinton Cerf, stated that "Paul wasn't afraid to go in directions counter to what everyone else thought was the right or only thing to do," According to Paul Saffo, Baran also believed that innovation was a "team process" and he didn't seek credit for himself. On hearing news of his death, Robert Kahn, co-inventor of the Internet, said: "Paul was one of the finest gentlemen I ever met and creative to the very end."

In recent years, the origins of the Internet have been subject to claims and counterclaims of precedence, and Mr. Baran was an outspoken proponent of distributing credit widely.

“The Internet is really the work of a thousand people,” he said in an interview in 2001. “The process of technological developments is like building a cathedral,” he said in an interview in 1990. “Over the course of several hundred years, new people come along and each lays down a block on top of the old foundations, each saying, ‘I built a cathedral.’ “Next month another block is placed atop the previous one. Then comes along an historian who asks, ‘Well, who built the cathedral?’ Peter added some stones here, and Paul added a few more. If you are not careful you can con yourself into believing that you did the most important part. But the reality is that each contribution has to follow onto previous work. Everything is tied to everything else.”

Baran ,In addition to his son, David, of Atherton, Calif.,is survived by three grandchildren; and his companion of recent years, Ruth Rothman.

An outstandin story of a man who pursued his dreams when no one was ready to be ready for such dreams....

RIP