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Paul Baran
(April 29, 1926—)
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hi-res
(Photo credit: Photographer Louis Fabian Bachrach) |
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Paul Baran developed
a fundamental concept behind today's advanced communications
networking systems: digital packet switching.
Baran was born in
Grodno, Poland and came to the U.S. at the age of two. In 1949,
he earned his B.S. in electrical engineering from Drexel
University and his M.S. from the University of California at Los
Angeles in 1959. Following his graduation from UCLA, Baran was
at the RAND Corporation where he designed a communication
network to survive a first strike from the Soviet Union during
the Cold War. He based his network on a mesh network able to
reconfigure itself to bypass non-working areas. To create this
totally decentralized network, Baran divided the communications
stream into message blocks, or “packets,” sent along various
paths to eventually be rejoined into a whole at their
destination.
The digital packet concept is a paradigm shift from the circuit
switched communications networks of the past. Packet switching
enables the construction of digital networks with greater
flexibility, reliability, robustness, and lower cost than
circuit switching and now has become the new standard way of
building communications networks. Baran holds 31 patents for
his work on several new communications technologies in part
based upon the concept of packets.
Paul Baran
Emmett W.
Chappelle
John E.
Franz
Leroy E. Hood
Paul Christian
Lauterbur
Peter
Mansfield
Robert M.
Metcalfe
David Wayne
Cushman
Donald
Watts Davies
William A.
Goddard
Peter
Carl Goldmark
Maurice
Ralph Hilleman
Godfrey
Newbold Hounsfield
John Joseph Lynott
Arthur
Nobile
Miguel
Angel Ondetti
Otto
Wichterle
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