Internet architect Paul Baran died at the age of 84

Perhaps Paul Baran was not the inventor of the Internet as such, but his work on the ARPANET was truly unique. The global network as we know it today owes its appearance to this particular person. Paul was 84, yesterday he died in his house in Palo Alto from complications of lung cancer, writes the New York Times .

Working in the RAND corporation in the early 60s, when the cold war between the USA and the USSR gained new momentum, Baran described a method for dividing information into “message blocks” that quickly move through networks, gathering at the end point. Later, the Englishman Donald Davis, who was working on a similar architecture in parallel, gave the name to this phenomenon - “packet switching” or packet switching.


In order to understand the development of packet switching in the form in which Paul Baran described it, it is important to understand the temporal and political conditions in which his work took place. The technology was strictly classified, and its very essence - the analysis of packets before transmission and collection at the end of the journey served only one purpose - to prevent data interception, but even if that happened, do not give the attacker the opportunity to collect the whole picture. Also, this method provided data delivery to the destination point even if one or several individual nodes were destroyed or not used for other reasons.
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The entire architecture of such processes was described by Baran in the form of 13 volumes of studies and tests, explaining in detail how to build a national decentralized network for data exchange, including media (voice).

Paul Baran was born in Poland (in Grodno - now Belarus), he emigrated to the USA along with his parents. He graduated from the University of Drexel in Philadelphia with a degree in Electrical Engineer. He worked at Eckert-Mauchly Computer, then at Hughes Aircraft in Los Angeles, completing his PhD in parallel. At this stage of his life, he joined the organization RAND , where the theoretical basis of the Internet was created, in the process of working on "robust communication systems."

Up until 1969, no one built a network conforming to the Baran specifications. In 69, the notorious office called the US Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency Network or Arpanet (a division of DARPA dealing with networks) nevertheless implemented the plans of the architect. The ARPANET has been replaced by the Natinal Science Foundation Network, which has grown into what we call the Internet today.

Interestingly, in the seventies, AT & T - a monopolist telecom, refused to allow Baran to implement his plans, calling his project “worthless”. Unlike Paul Baran, they thought analogously and did not understand that in the digital world, time flows very slowly.

Wired via ReadWriteWeb via NYT