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 ARPANET was truly unique. The World Wide Web, in the form in which we know it today, owes its appearance to this particular person. Paul was 84, and he died yesterday at his home in Palo Alto from complicating lung cancer, the New York Times writes .

Working at RAND Corporation in the early 60s, when the Cold War between the US and the USSR was gaining momentum, Beran described a method for dividing information into “message blocks” that quickly travel across networks, gathering at the end point. Later, the Englishman Donald Davis, who worked on 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 Beran 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 - analysis of packets before transmission and collection at the end of the path, served only one purpose - to prevent data interception, but even if this happened, to prevent the attacker from collecting the whole picture. Also, this method ensured the delivery of data to the destination, even if one or more individual nodes were destroyed or were not used for other reasons.

The entire architecture of such processes was described by Beran in the form of 13 volumes of studies and tests, explaining in detail how to build a national decentralized network for the exchange of data, including media (voice).

Paul Beran was born in Poland (in Grodno - now Belarus), emigrated to the United States with his parents. He graduated from the University of Drexel in Philadelphia with a degree in electrical engineering. He worked at Eckert-Mauchly Computer, then at Hughes Aircraft in Los Angeles, completing his doctorate at the same time. At this stage of his life, he joined the RAND organization , where the theoretical basis of the Internet was created, in the process of working on “survivable communication systems”.

Until 1969, no one had built a network that met Beran's specifications. In the 69th, a notorious office called the US Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency Network or Arpanet (the DARPA network department) did implement the architect’s plans. The ARPANET has been replaced by the Natinal Science Foundation Network, which has grown into what we today call the Internet.

It is interesting that in the seventies AT&T, a telecom monopolist, refused to Baran in the implementation of 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