Kleinrock, Leonard (Len) oral history | 102745954

Description

Leonard Kleinrock is an American electrical engineer, professor, and networking pioneer. Growing up in the Bronx borough of New York City, Kleinrock details his efforts to excel at school under trying circumstances, including working at an electronics store while doing his undergraduate work at CCNY. Despite attending night classes to accommodate his schedule, he was the only student from CCNY admitted to MIT that year and thus began his engineering studies at MIT in the fall of 1959. Eventually graduating with a PhD focusing on message passing and stochastic flows in 1964, he was relatively quickly offered a full-time teaching position at UCLA, where has been ever since.
In 1967, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) chose Kleinrock's UCLA laboratory to run the Network Measurement Center (NMC) for the ARPANET. The mission was to analyze performance on this pioneering packet-switched network. UCLA received the first network node from developer BBN near Boston, and wrote the interface to connect with the lab's host computer. On October 29, 1969 the initial connection between host computers was made from UCLA to the second node, the Network Information Center (NIC) at SRI International near Stanford University. The ARPANET would become a pivotal part of the early Internet.
As a faculty member, Kleinrock’s influence is seen in his supervision of students who became pivotal figures in the development of the ARPANET and Internet. Their work spans all aspects of networking including Internet protocols, performance evaluation and design of packet networks, wireless network studies, nomadic computing, peer-to-peer networks, congestion control, distributed systems, intelligent software agents and more. These students, along with their students, form a cadre of networking experts worldwide.
In the late 1980’s, Kleinrock presented to then-senator Al Gore and his senate sub-committee the results of a National Research Council committee report that he had chaired. This helped to influence Gore to secure major support from the federal government leading to the $600 million High Performance Computing Act of 1991, an Act that produced the National Information Infrastructure.

Date

2011-09-28

Participants

Kleinrock, Leonard, Interviewee

Weber, Marc, Interviewer

Publisher

Computer History Museum

Place of Publication

Los Angeles, CA

Duration

03:29:13

Format

Mini-DV

Copyright Holder

Computer History Museum

Collection Title

Oral history collection

Lot Number

X6295.2012

Artifact Details

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