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Blog | A Tribute To The Father Of Internet
Created by News Editor | 0 comments | May 30, 2011 12:00
By Alina Ovanesso
It’s common to honour outstanding people with distinguished titles, particularly after their death, and the person this article is dedicated to is no exception. Paul Baran, a ‘father of the Internet’ and ‘Internet and packet switching pioneer’, passed away 28 March 2011, leaving behind his remarkable inventions, the fruits of which we all currently enjoy. But who was he and what is the impact of his work in the eyes of the world?
Paul Baran was born in Grodno, Poland (now Belarus), one of three kids in his Jewish family. Paul was only two years old when his family moved to the US, less than ten years before the Nazi invasion of Poland. Where his family might have endured deportation to a concentration camp, instead Baran’s father opened a grocery store in Philidelphia, and Baran grew up as perhaps any typical American. As a boy, Paul helped the family business by delivering groceries in his little red wagon. But at the same time, Baran was not content to be a grocer. He was steadily developing an interest in electronics, and eventually went on to Drexel University to study electrical engineering. After graduating, Baran joined Eckert-Mauchly Computer Company and worked on UNIVAC models, the first commercial computers in the US. After obtaining his Masters in Engineering, Paul began working for RAND Corporation.
There are now a number of important networking inventions attributed to Baran, e.g. packet voice technology, the discrete, multitone modem technology used in DSL modems and in the first public wireless mesh networking system, Ricochet. In addition to his innovation in networking products, he is also credited with inventing the metal detector used in airports. However, his most famous invention is considered to be the concept of message block switching, which he developed for the US Air Force during his research at RAND in the early 1960s.
But how did we benefit from this? Packet switching is used in the Internet and local area networks as well as newer mobile phone technologies. It optimizes the use of channel capacity in computer networks, minimizing the time it takes for data to pass across the network as well as increasing the robustness of communication. In layman’s terms, every click to send our emails results in a whole process whereby data gets broken up into small pieces, travels various routes, overcomes possible transmission errors, recovers and at the point of delivery successfully reassembles. It’s an amazing process, and yet we connect without questioning a thing! In fact, few of us may know that the entire network paradigm was designed to withstand a nuclear attack during the Cold War. The military innovation of packet switching has since made its way into our everyday lives, hugely impacting the essence of communication. We can’t imagine a world without it…. and yet, who do we owe it to?
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