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Paul Baran (born Pesach Baran ; April 29, 1926 – March 26, 2011) was a Polish-American engineer who was a pioneer in the development of
computer network A computer network is a set of computers sharing resources located on or provided by network nodes. The computers use common communication protocols over digital interconnections to communicate with each other. These interconnections are ...
s. He was one of the two independent inventors of
packet switching In telecommunications, packet switching is a method of grouping data into '' packets'' that are transmitted over a digital network. Packets are made of a header and a payload. Data in the header is used by networking hardware to direct the p ...
, which is today the dominant basis for data communications in computer networks worldwide, and went on to start several companies and develop other technologies that are an essential part of modern digital communication.


Early life

He was born in
Grodno Grodno (russian: Гродно, pl, Grodno; lt, Gardinas) or Hrodna ( be, Гродна ), is a city in western Belarus. The city is located on the Neman River, 300 km (186 mi) from Minsk, about 15 km (9 mi) from the Polish b ...
(then
Second Polish Republic The Second Polish Republic, at the time officially known as the Republic of Poland, was a country in Central and Eastern Europe that existed between 1918 and 1939. The state was established on 6 November 1918, before the end of the First World ...
, since 1945 part of
Belarus Belarus,, , ; alternatively and formerly known as Byelorussia (from Russian ). officially the Republic of Belarus,; rus, Республика Беларусь, Respublika Belarus. is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe. It is bordered by ...
) on April 29, 1926. He was the youngest of three children in his
Lithuanian Jewish Lithuanian Jews or Litvaks () are Jews with roots in the territory of the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania (covering present-day Lithuania, Belarus, Latvia, the northeastern Suwałki and Białystok regions of Poland, as well as adjacent ...
family, with the
Yiddish Yiddish (, or , ''yidish'' or ''idish'', , ; , ''Yidish-Taytsh'', ) is a West Germanic language historically spoken by Ashkenazi Jews. It originated during the 9th century in Central Europe, providing the nascent Ashkenazi community with a ve ...
given name "Pesach". His family moved to the United States on May 11, 1928, settling in
Boston Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...
and later in
Philadelphia Philadelphia, often called Philly, is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the sixth-largest city in the U.S., the second-largest city in both the Northeast megalopolis and Mid-Atlantic regions after New York City. Since ...
, where his father, Morris "Moshe" Baran (1884–1979), opened a grocery store. He graduated from
Drexel University Drexel University is a private research university with its main campus in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Drexel's undergraduate school was founded in 1891 by Anthony J. Drexel, a financier and philanthropist. Founded as Drexel Institute of Art, ...
(then called Drexel Institute of Technology) in 1949, with a degree in
electrical engineering Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems which use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...
. He then joined the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Company, where he did technical work on
UNIVAC UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer) was a line of electronic digital stored-program computers starting with the products of the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation. Later the name was applied to a division of the Remington Rand company an ...
models, the first brand of commercial computers in the United States. In 1955 he married Evelyn Murphy, moved to Los Angeles, and worked for
Hughes Aircraft The Hughes Aircraft Company was a major American aerospace and defense contractor founded on February 14, 1934 by Howard Hughes in Glendale, California, as a division of Hughes Tool Company. The company was known for producing, among other pro ...
on radar data processing systems. He obtained his master's degree in engineering from
UCLA The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California ...
in 1959, with advisor
Gerald Estrin Gerald Estrin (September 9, 1921 – March 29, 2012) was an American computer scientist, and professor at the UCLA Computer Science Department. He is known for his work on the organization of computer systems, on parallel processing and SARA ...
while he took night classes. His thesis was on character recognition. While Baran initially stayed on at UCLA to pursue his doctorate, a heavy travel and work schedule forced him to abandon his doctoral work.


Packet switched network design

After joining the
RAND Corporation The RAND Corporation (from the phrase "research and development") is an American nonprofit global policy think tank created in 1948 by Douglas Aircraft Company to offer research and analysis to the United States Armed Forces. It is finance ...
in 1959, Baran took on the task of designing a "survivable" communications system that could maintain communication between end points in the face of damage from
nuclear weapon A nuclear weapon is an explosive device that derives its destructive force from nuclear reactions, either fission (fission bomb) or a combination of fission and fusion reactions ( thermonuclear bomb), producing a nuclear explosion. Both bomb ...
s during the
Cold War The Cold War is a term commonly used to refer to a period of geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies, the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc. The term '' cold war'' is used because t ...
. Then, most American military communications used high-frequency connections, which could be put out of action for many hours by a nuclear attack. Baran decided to automate RAND Director Franklin R. Collbohm's previous work with emergency communication over conventional AM radio networks and showed that a distributed relay node architecture could be survivable. The
Rome Air Development Center Rome Laboratory (Rome Air Development Center until 1991) is the US "Air Force 'superlab' for command, control, and communications" research and development and is responsible for planning and executing the USAF science and technology program. ...
soon showed that the idea was practicable. Stewart Brand's interviews Paul Baran about his work at RAND on survivable networks. Using the minicomputer technology of the day, Baran and his team developed a simulation suite to test basic connectivity of an array of nodes with varying degrees of linking. That is, a network of n-ary degree of connectivity would have n links per node. The simulation randomly "killed" nodes and subsequently tested the percentage of nodes that remained connected. The result of the simulation revealed that networks in which n ≥ 3 had a significant increase in resilience against even as much as 50% node loss. Baran's insight gained from the simulation was that redundancy was the key. His first work was published as a RAND report in 1960, with more papers generalizing the techniques in the next two years. After proving survivability, Baran and his team needed to show proof of concept for that design so that it could be built. That involved high-level schematics detailing the operation, construction, and cost of all the components required to construct a network that leveraged the new insight of redundant links. The result was one of the first store-and-forward data layer switching protocols, a link-state/distance vector routing protocol, and an unproved connection-oriented transport protocol. Explicit detail of the designs can be found in the complete series of reports ''On Distributed Communications'', published by RAND in 1964. The design flew in the face of telephony design of the time by placing inexpensive and unreliable nodes at the center of the network and more intelligent terminating 'multiplexer' devices at the endpoints. In Baran's words, unlike the telephone company's equipment, his design did not require expensive "gold plated" components to be reliable. The Distributed Network that Baran introduced was intended to route around damage. It provided connection to others through many points, not one centralized connection. Fundamental to the scheme was the division of the information into "blocks" before they were sent out across the network. That enabled the data to travel faster and communications lines to be used more efficiently. Each block was sent separately, traveling different paths and rejoining into a whole when they were received at their destination.


Selling the idea

After the publication of ''On Distributed Communications'', he presented the findings of his team to a number of audiences, including AT&T engineers (not to be confused with Bell Labs engineers, who at the time provided Paul Baran with the specifications for the first generation of T1 circuit that he used as the links in his network design proposal). In subsequent interviews, Baran mentioned how the AT&T engineers scoffed at his idea of non-dedicated physical circuits for voice communications, at times claiming that Baran simply did not understand how voice telecommunication worked.
Donald Davies Donald Watts Davies, (7 June 1924 – 28 May 2000) was a Welsh computer scientist who was employed at the UK National Physical Laboratory (NPL). In 1965 he conceived of packet switching, which is today the dominant basis for data communic ...
, at the National Physical Laboratory in the
United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and ...
, also thought of the same idea and implemented a trial network. While Baran used the term "message blocks" for his units of communication, Davies used the term "packets," as it was capable of being translated into languages other than English without compromise. He applied the concept to a general-purpose computer network. Davies's key insight came in the realization that computer network traffic was inherently "bursty" with periods of silence, compared with relatively-constant telephone traffic. It was in fact Davies's work on packet switching, not Baran's, that initially caught the attention of the developers of ARPANET at the Symposium on Operating Systems Principles in October 1967. Baran was happy to acknowledge that Davies had come up with the same idea as him independently. In an e-mail to Davies, he wrote:
Leonard Kleinrock Leonard Kleinrock (born June 13, 1934) is an American computer scientist and a long-tenured professor at UCLA's Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science. In the early 1960s, Kleinrock pioneered the application of queueing theor ...
, a contemporary working on analyzing message flow using
queueing theory Queueing theory is the mathematical study of waiting lines, or queues. A queueing model is constructed so that queue lengths and waiting time can be predicted. Queueing theory is generally considered a branch of operations research because the ...
, developed a theoretical basis for the operation of message switching networks in his proposal for a Ph.D. thesis in 1961-2, published as a book in 1964. In the early 1970s, he applied this theory to model the performance of packet switching networks. However, the representation of Kleinrock's early work as originating the concept of packet switching is disputed by other internet pioneers, including Robert Taylor, Baran and Davies. Baran and Davies are recognized by historians and the U.S.
National Inventors Hall of Fame The National Inventors Hall of Fame (NIHF) is an American not-for-profit organization, founded in 1973, which recognizes individual engineers and inventors who hold a U.S. patent of significant technology. Besides the Hall of Fame, it also oper ...
for independently inventing the concept of digital packet switching used in modern computer networking including the Internet. In 1969, when the US
Advanced Research Projects Agency The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. Originally known as the Adv ...
(ARPA) started developing the idea of an internetworked set of terminals to share computing resources, the reference materials that they considered included Baran and the RAND Corporation's "On Distributed Communications" volumes. The resiliency of a packet-switched network that uses link-state routing protocols, which are used on the
Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, p ...
, stems in some part from the research to develop a network that could survive a nuclear attack.


Later work

In 1968, Baran was a founder of the Institute for the Future and was then involved in other networking technologies developed in
Silicon Valley Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that serves as a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical areas San Mateo Cou ...
. He wrote on the subject of computer systems and
privacy Privacy (, ) is the ability of an individual or group to seclude themselves or information about themselves, and thereby express themselves selectively. The domain of privacy partially overlaps with security, which can include the concepts of ...
. Baran participated in a review of the NBS proposal for a
Data Encryption Standard The Data Encryption Standard (DES ) is a symmetric-key algorithm for the encryption of digital data. Although its short key length of 56 bits makes it too insecure for modern applications, it has been highly influential in the advancement of cry ...
in 1976, along with
Martin Hellman Martin Edward Hellman (born October 2, 1945) is an American cryptologist and mathematician, best known for his involvement with public key cryptography in cooperation with Whitfield Diffie and Ralph Merkle. Hellman is a longtime contributor to ...
and Whitfield Diffie of
Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is conside ...
. In the early 1980s, Baran founded PacketCable, Inc, "to support impulse-pay television channels, locally generated videotex, and packetized voice transmission." PacketCable, also known as Packet Technologies, spun off
StrataCom StrataCom, Inc. was a supplier of Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) and Frame Relay high-speed wide area network (WAN) switching equipment. StrataCom was founded in Cupertino, California, United States, in January 1986, by 26 former employees of t ...
to commercialize his packet voice technology for the telephony market. That technology led to the first commercial pre-standard
Asynchronous Transfer Mode Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) is a telecommunications standard defined by American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and ITU-T (formerly CCITT) for digital transmission of multiple types of traffic. ATM was developed to meet the needs of ...
product. He founded Telebit after conceiving its discrete multitone
modem A modulator-demodulator or modem is a computer hardware device that converts data from a digital format into a format suitable for an analog transmission medium such as telephone or radio. A modem transmits data by modulating one or more c ...
technology in the mid-1980s. It was one of the first commercial products to use
orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing In telecommunications, orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) is a type of digital transmission and a method of encoding digital data on multiple carrier frequencies. OFDM has developed into a popular scheme for wideband digital comm ...
, which was later widely deployed in DSL modems and
Wi-Fi Wi-Fi () is a family of wireless network protocols, based on the IEEE 802.11 family of standards, which are commonly used for local area networking of devices and Internet access, allowing nearby digital devices to exchange data by radio waves ...
wireless modems. In 1985, Baran founded
Metricom Ricochet was one of the first wireless Internet access services in the United States, before Wi-Fi, 3G, and other technologies were available to the general public. It was developed and first offered by Metricom Incorporated, which shut down in ...
, the first wireless Internet company, which deployed Ricochet, the first public wireless mesh networking system. In 1992, he also founded
Com21 Com21 was an early pioneer in developing cable modem networks in the era before the standard DOCSIS was introduced for Internet access via cable television networks. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2003. The company Com21 Inc. was an America ...
, an early cable modem company. After Com21, Baran founded and was president of GoBackTV, which specializes in personal TV and cable
IPTV Internet Protocol television (IPTV) is the delivery of television content over Internet Protocol (IP) networks. This is in contrast to delivery through traditional terrestrial, satellite, and cable television formats. Unlike downloaded med ...
infrastructure equipment for television operators. Most recently, he founded Plaster Networks, providing an advanced solution for connecting networked devices in the home or small office through existing wiring. Baran extended his work in packet switching to wireless-spectrum theory, developing what he called "kindergarten rules" for the use of wireless spectrum. In addition to his innovation in networking products, he is also credited with inventing the first doorway gun detector. He received an honorary doctorate when he gave the commencement speech at Drexel in 1997.


Death

Baran died in
Palo Alto, California Palo Alto (; Spanish for "tall stick") is a charter city in the northwestern corner of Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto. The city was es ...
, at the age of 84 on March 26, 2011 from complications caused by lung cancer. Upon his death, RAND President James Thomson, stated, "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, "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 avoided seeking 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."


Awards and honors

*
IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal The IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal is an award honoring ''"exceptional contributions to communications and networking sciences and engineering"'' in the field of telecommunications. The medal is one of the highest honors awarded by the Instit ...
(1990) * Marconi Prize (1991) * Nippon Electronics Corporation C&C Prize (1996) * Bower Award and Prize for Achievement in Science (2001) * Fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, a ...
(2003) * Fellow of the
Computer History Museum The Computer History Museum (CHM) is a museum of computer history, located in Mountain View, California. The museum presents stories and artifacts of Silicon Valley and the information age, and explores the computing revolution and its impact o ...
(2005) "for fundamental contributions to the architecture of the Internet and for a lifetime of entrepreneurial activity." *
National Inventors Hall of Fame The National Inventors Hall of Fame (NIHF) is an American not-for-profit organization, founded in 1973, which recognizes individual engineers and inventors who hold a U.S. patent of significant technology. Besides the Hall of Fame, it also oper ...
(2007) *
National Medal of Technology and Innovation The National Medal of Technology and Innovation (formerly the National Medal of Technology) is an honor granted by the President of the United States to American inventors and innovators who have made significant contributions to the development ...
(2007) * UCLA Engineering Alumnus of the Year (2009) *
Internet Hall of Fame The Internet Hall of Fame is an honorary lifetime achievement award administered by the Internet Society (ISOC) in recognition of individuals who have made significant contributions to the development and advancement of the Internet.
(2012)2012 Inductees
Internet Hall of Fame The Internet Hall of Fame is an honorary lifetime achievement award administered by the Internet Society (ISOC) in recognition of individuals who have made significant contributions to the development and advancement of the Internet.
website. Last accessed April 24, 2012


See also

*
Internet pioneers Instead of having a single "inventor", the Internet was developed by many people over many years. The following are some Internet pioneers who contributed to its early and ongoing development. These include early theoretical foundations, specifyi ...


References


External links

* * A 44-page transcript in which Baran describes his working environment at
RAND The RAND Corporation (from the phrase "research and development") is an American nonprofit global policy think tank created in 1948 by Douglas Aircraft Company to offer research and analysis to the United States Armed Forces. It is finan ...
, his initial interest in survivable communications, the evolution of his plan for distributed networks, the objections he received, and the writing and distribution of his eleven-volume work, ''On Distributed Communications''. Baran discusses his interaction with the group at ARPA who were responsible for the later development of the
ARPANET The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the technical fou ...
. * * This describes Paul Baran's development of packet switching and its application to wireless computing. * A transcript of Baran's keynote address at the Countdown to Technology 2000 Winter Conference that includes a photo. * * *
Paul Baran named 1991 Marconi Fellow
RAND Corporation {{DEFAULTSORT:Baran, Paul 1926 births 2011 deaths American telecommunications industry businesspeople American people of Belarusian-Jewish descent American people of Polish-Jewish descent Belarusian Jews Drexel University alumni Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Internet pioneers Packets (information technology) People from Grodno People from Białystok Voivodeship (1919–1939) National Medal of Technology recipients RAND Corporation people Polish emigrants to the United States UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science alumni 20th-century American inventors