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For fundamental contributions to the architecture of the internet and for a lifetime of entrepreneurial activity.
"Nothing can exist by itself. Every object in the universe is connected (by gravity/radiation vectors) to every other object in the universe." |
Paul Baran was born in Grodno, Poland in 1926 and at the age of two emigrated to the United States with his parents. Baran received a B.S. in electrical engineering from Drexel University in 1949. He then joined the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Company where he was a technician on the Univac I computer.
In 1959 Baran received an M.S. degree in engineering from UCLA and joined the RAND Corporation, where he developed the concept of packet switching to make distributed networks feasible. At RAND he wrote a 13-volume set of reports defining in detail an all digital nationally distributed network for digital voice and data. (Several years later packet switching was invented independently by Donald Davies in the UK and who gave it the name "packet switching.")
Baran's research was motivated by the cold war demand for a survivable network enabling an American "second strike" capability theoretically discouraging a possible attack by the Soviet Union. Baran's solution was to eliminate dependence upon the United States. highly centralized telephone facilities by using a series of digital "nodes" (computers) to route packets from one to another. If any node was unavailable -- destroyed in an attack, for example -- Baran's scheme automatically selected another node and bypassed the damaged nodes. Baran's packet switching ideas served as a foundation upon which others later built the ARPANET, which, over time, evolved into the early Internet.
Baran left Rand in 1968 to co-found the Institute for the Future, a not-for-profit research group specializing in long-range forecasting. In 1972, he started a number of for-profit companies based on technologies he developed. These include Cabledata Associates, Equatorial Communications, Telebit, and Packet Technologies/Stratacom. In 1986, he co-founded Metricom and Ricochet wireless and in 1989, InterFax. He co-founded Com21 in 1995 and co-founded GoBackTV in 2003.
He has authored over 150 papers and 40 patents. Among his many awards are the IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal in 1990 for his work on packet switching, and the Franklin Institute's Bower Award and Prize in Science in 2001.