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IP: Wired Article on Paul Baran
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2001 07:33:31 -0500
User-Agent: Microsoft-Entourage/9.0.2509 Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2001 22:25:36 -0600 Subject: Wired Article on Paul Baran From: John Lyon <jelyon () jelyon com> To: <farber () cis upenn edu> Prof. Farber; I haven't seen this mentioned in IP yet - Wired had an interesting interview with Paul Baran in the March 2001 issue (p. 145) that might be of interest to the IP list. It's also available on-line: http://www.wired.com:80/wired/archive/9.03/baran.html I found the following quote of particular interest: "The question was, 'Do we keep is secret?' From the beginning, the answer was no...our whole plan, the concept of packet switching and all the details, was wide open. Not only did Rand publish it, they sent it to all the repository laboratories in the world." That started me to wondering; how can Microsoft say that Open Source is a threat to innovation, when the (arguably) greatest source of innovation of the last 10-20 years (the Interenet) is "wide open?" Anyway, an excerpt: Founding Father Paul Baran conceived the Internet's architecture at the height of the Cold War. Forty years later, he says the Net's biggest threat wasn't the USSR - it was the phone company. By Stewart Brand In 1961, at the height of the Cold War, an engineer named Paul Baran sold the US Department of Defense on the idea of a failure-resistant communications method called packet switching. But because of roadblocks at AT&T and the Pentagon, it wasn't until the 1970s that the technology was finally adopted as the foundation architecture of the Arpanet - the precursor to the Internet. In April, Baran (pronounced "BEAR-en") will receive the Franklin Institute's 2001 Bower Award and Prize for Achievement in Science, his latest in a string of prestigious honors from professional organizations including the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and NEC. Over a lifetime of quietly sustained achievement as inventor and entrepreneur, Baran cofounded the Institute for the Future and created a series of successful companies - Cabledata Associates, Packet Technologies, Metricom, Interfax, and Com21 - based on technologies he developed. As corporations like Cisco acquired his businesses, Baran's inventions went mainstream: His discrete multitone technology is at the heart of DSL, and his developments in spread spectrum transmission are essential to the ongoing wireless explosion. Yet Baran is little known outside his field.
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- IP: Wired Article on Paul Baran David Farber (Mar 21)