Items23The creator’s order
  1. 1Paul BaranPaul BaranBorn 29 Apr 1926Distributed networks. At the RAND Corporation between 1960 and 1964 Baran worked out how a communications network could survive heavy damage: link many nodes in a mesh, cut each message into small blocks and let every block find its own route. The telephone monopoly dismissed the idea and it was…0i
  2. 2Donald DaviesDonald DaviesBorn 7 Jun 1924Packet switching. Working independently of Baran at Britain's National Physical Laboratory, Davies proposed in 1965 a national data network that would break messages into short blocks he called packets, the word the whole industry adopted. His team built the NPL network in Teddington, one of the…0i
  3. 3Leonard KleinrockLeonard KleinrockBorn 13 Jun 1934Network performance theory. Kleinrock's doctoral work at MIT applied queueing theory to networks of message switches, giving engineers a way to predict delays and capacity before building anything. At UCLA his laboratory hosted the first ARPANET node, and on 29 October 1969 his student Charley…0i
  4. 4Larry Roberts (computer scientist)Larry Roberts (computer scientist)Born 21 Dec 1937The ARPANET plan. As programme manager at the US Defense Department's research agency from 1966, Roberts wrote the plan for the ARPANET, adopted packet switching after hearing of Davies's and Baran's work, and chose Bolt Beranek and Newman to build the small routing computers. He then ran the…0i
  5. 5Steve CrockerSteve CrockerBorn 15 Oct 1944Requests for Comments. As a UCLA graduate student in 1969 Crocker led the informal Network Working Group that designed the ARPANET's first host protocols, and wrote RFC 1, deliberately titling its notes requests for comments so that anyone could propose and argue. That open, written,…0i
  6. 6Jon PostelJon PostelEditor and number keeper. Postel edited the RFC series for nearly thirty years and personally kept the registry of addresses, port numbers and protocol codes that later became the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, so that every network used the same numbers. He wrote or edited the specifications…0i
  7. 7Ray TomlinsonRay TomlinsonNetwork email. Messages could already be left for users of the same computer. In 1971 Tomlinson, an engineer at Bolt Beranek and Newman, adapted a file-transfer program to deliver them between machines on the ARPANET, and chose the at sign to separate the user's name from the host's. Email quickly…0i
  8. 8Louis PouzinLouis PouzinDatagrams. Pouzin led France's CYCLADES network from 1971, which made the network itself simple and unreliable and gave the computers at each end the job of checking and reassembling data. That datagram approach was far easier to scale than the ARPANET's managed links, and Cerf and Kahn built it…0i
  9. 9Elizabeth J. FeinlerElizabeth J. FeinlerThe Network Information Center. From 1972 to 1989 Feinler ran the ARPANET's Network Information Center at the Stanford Research Institute, which kept the directory of every host and user and published the host table each computer downloaded to find the others. Her group also ran the naming registry…0i
  10. 10Robert Kahn (computer scientist)Robert Kahn (computer scientist)Born 23 Dec 1938Open-architecture networking. Kahn had helped design the ARPANET's routing computers at Bolt Beranek and Newman before moving to the defence research agency in 1972, where he faced joining radio, satellite and wired networks that worked in completely different ways. His answer was a common protocol…0i