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Paul Baran

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Paul Baran (born Pesach Baran Template:IPAc-en; April 29, 1926 – March 26, 2011) was a Polish-American engineer who was a pioneer in the development of computer networks. He was one of the two independent inventors of packet switching, 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 lifeEdit

He was born in Grodno (then in the Second Polish Republic, and since 1945 part of Belarus) on April 29, 1926.<ref name="NYT-obit">Template:Cite news</ref><ref name="IEEE GHN">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> He was the youngest of three children in his Lithuanian Jewish family,<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> with the Yiddish given name "Pesach". His family moved to the United States on May 11, 1928,<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> settling in Boston and later in Philadelphia, where his father, Morris "Moshe" Baran (1884–1979), opened a grocery store. He graduated from Drexel University (then called Drexel Institute of Technology) in 1949, with a degree in electrical engineering. He then joined the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Company, where he did technical work on UNIVAC models, the first brand of commercial computers in the United States.<ref name="Franklin Institute">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> In 1955 he married Evelyn Murphy, moved to Los Angeles, and worked for Hughes Aircraft on radar data processing systems. He obtained his master's degree in engineering from UCLA in 1959, with advisor Gerald Estrin while he took night classes. His thesis was on character recognition.<ref name="NYT-obit"/> While Baran initially stayed on at UCLA to pursue his doctorate, a heavy travel and work schedule forced him to abandon his doctoral work.<ref name=wizards>Template:Cite book</ref>

Packet switched network designEdit

File:The idea of the data packet (Baran, 1964)-en.svg
The "block message" as suggested by Paul Baran in 1964, this is the very first data packet that was ever proposed.

After joining the RAND Corporation 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 weapons during the Cold War.<ref name=bbc>Template:Cite news</ref> 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 soon showed that the idea was practicable.<ref name=Brand>Template:Cite magazine Stewart Brand's interviews Paul Baran about his work at RAND on survivable networks.</ref>

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.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> His first work was published as a RAND report in 1960,<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> with more papers generalizing the techniques in the next two years.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

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.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

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 ideaEdit

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.<ref> Template:Cite news</ref>

Donald Davies, at the National Physical Laboratory in the United Kingdom, also thought of the same idea and implemented a trial network.<ref name="NYT-obit" /><ref name="Harvnb|Harris">Template:Cite journal</ref> 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.<ref name="Harvnb|Harris"/> 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.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Template:Cite magazine</ref> 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:

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Leonard Kleinrock, a contemporary working on analyzing message flow using queueing theory, 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.<ref>Template:Citation</ref> 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,<ref>Template:Citation "...there is nothing in the entire 1964 book that suggests, analyzes, or alludes to the idea of packetization."</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref name="Harvnb|Harris"/><ref>Template:Cite AV media</ref> including Robert Taylor,<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> Baran<ref>Template:Citation</ref> and Davies.<ref>Template:CitationTemplate:Dead linkTemplate:Cbignore </ref> Baran and Davies are recognized by historians and the U.S. National Inventors Hall of Fame for independently inventing the concept of digital packet switching used in modern computer networking including the Internet.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref><ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}; {{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

In 1969, when the US Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) started implementing 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.<ref name="NYT-obit"/> The resiliency of a packet-switched network that uses link-state routing protocols, which are used on the Internet, stems in part from the research to develop a network that could survive a nuclear attack.<ref name="NYT-obit" /><ref name="BBC-obit" />

Later workEdit

In 1968, Baran was a founder of the Institute for the Future and was then involved in other networking technologies developed in Silicon Valley. He wrote on the subject of computer systems and privacy.<ref name=ppaf/> Baran participated in a review of the NBS proposal for a Data Encryption Standard in 1976, along with Martin Hellman and Whitfield Diffie of Stanford University.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

In 1971, he predicted the development of household Email. He estimated potential revenue for such services to be $707 million by 1989.<ref name="chm-email-innovation-timeline">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

In the early 1980s, Baran founded PacketCable, Inc, "to support impulse-pay television channels, locally generated videotex, and packetized voice transmission."<ref name=ppaf>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>Baran, "Packetcable: A New Interactive Cable System Technology," 31st Annual NCTA Convention Official Transcript, 1982, cited in US patent 4,754,426</ref> PacketCable, also known as Packet Technologies, spun off StrataCom to commercialize his packet voice technology for the telephony market. That technology led to the first commercial pre-standard Asynchronous Transfer Mode product.

He founded Telebit after conceiving its discrete multitone modem technology in the mid-1980s. It was one of the first commercial products to use orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing, which was later widely deployed in DSL modems and Wi-Fi wireless modems.

In 1985, Baran founded Metricom, the first wireless Internet company, which deployed Ricochet,<ref name="IEEE GHN"/> the first public wireless mesh networking system. In 1992, he also founded Com21, an early cable modem company.<ref name="Franklin Institute"/> After Com21, Baran founded and was president of GoBackTV, which specializes in personal TV and cable IPTV infrastructure equipment for television operators.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Later, he founded Plaster Networks, providing an advanced solution for connecting networked devices in the home or small office through existing wiring.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Baran extended his work in packet switching to wireless-spectrum theory, developing what he called "kindergarten rules" for the use of wireless spectrum.<ref name=EFF>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

In addition to his innovation in networking products, he is also credited with inventing the first doorway gun detector.<ref name="Franklin Institute"/><ref name="latimes">Template:Cite news</ref>

He received an honorary doctorate when he gave the commencement speech at Drexel in 1997.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

DeathEdit

Baran died in Palo Alto, California, at the age of 84 on March 26, 2011<ref name="NYT-obit"/><ref name="ZDNet-obit">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> from complications caused by lung cancer.<ref name="BBC-obit"/> 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."<ref name="ZDNet-obit"/>

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."<ref name="BBC-obit">Template:Cite news</ref> According to Paul Saffo, Baran also believed that innovation was a "team process" and avoided seeking credit for himself.<ref name="latimes"/> 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 honorsEdit

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See alsoEdit

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ReferencesEdit

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External linksEdit

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|CitationClass=web }} A 44-page transcript in which Baran describes his working environment at RAND, 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.

  • Template:Cite journal This describes Paul Baran's development of packet switching and its application to wireless computing.
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|CitationClass=web }} A transcript of Baran's keynote address at the Countdown to Technology 2000 Winter Conference that includes a photo.

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