IP: Wired Article on Paul Baran

[David Farber <dave@farber.net>]

>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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