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Inventor of the Week Archive
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Digital Packet-Switching
 Paul Baran, computer
technologist and entrepreneur, was responsible for one of the
fundamental concepts that enables today's advanced computer
networking systems: digital packet-switching. As such, he has
sometimes been referred to as one of the "grandfathers of the
Internet."
Baran was born in Poland in 1926. In 1928, his
family moved to the United States and Baran spent much of his
childhood helping out with the family grocery store in
Philadelphia. After high school he attended Drexel University
where he earned a degree in electrical engineering. When he
left Drexel, Baran took a job as a technician at the
Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corp. where he worked on Univac, the
world's first computer. Soon after he married and moved to Los
Angeles to work at the Hughes Aircraft Company. He began
taking night classes at UCLA and earned a master's degree in
engineering in 1959.
That year, Baran left Hughes to work for the
computer science department in the mathematics division of the
Rand Institute, a nonprofit research and development
organization. At that time Rand focused on Cold War-related
military problems, and Baran became interested in the survival
of communication networks in the event of a nuclear attack. It
was then that he conceived of the Internet and digital packet
switching, which allows pieces of information to be divided
into small packets of data that are addressed, sent to a
specific destination, and then reassembled.
Baran had been working off the idea that the
U.S. had to be able to survive a first strike from the Soviet
Union and still be able to launch a counter-attack. Baran
thought he could design a more powerful communication network
by using digital computers and by introducing redundancy.
Although he faced skepticism, Baran persevered. He studied the
brain and found that it can recover lost functions by
bypassing a dysfunctional region; it does so by not solely
relying on a single set of dedicated cells for a given
function. He thought he might be able to apply this principle
to the design of a communication network.
Thus, Baran suggested a distributed network–"a
communication network which will allow several hundred major
communications stations to talk with one another after an
enemy attack." This type of system would have no centralized
switch. He also had the idea to divide messages into "message
blocks" before sending them out across the network. Each block
would be sent separately and rejoined into a whole when they
were received at their destination. This concept later came to
be known as packet-switching. Years later, Lawrence Roberts
was beginning work on the ARPANET at MIT when he heard of
Baran's ideas. He was designing a network both to facilitate
communications between ARPA researchers and to allow them to
use remote computing resources effectively. He decided to
adopt Baran's distributed network and packet-switching
schemes, and Baran became an informal consultant for the
ARPANET project, which eventually led to what we now call the
Internet.
Baran now lives in Atherton, Calif., with his
wife. Baran serves as board chairman for Com21 Inc., which he
founded in 1992. Com21 Inc. makes cable modems for high-speed,
high-bandwidth Internet access. This company is one of a
number of high-tech firms started by Baran over the years. He
founded six companies in Silicon Valley including Cable Data
Associates, established in Menlo Park in 1974. Telebit, his
second company, was acquired by Cisco Systems. Equatorial
Communications was acquired by Comtel and then acquired by
GTE. Packet Technologies became StrataCom and again was
subsequently acquired by Cisco Systems. Baran also co-founded
Metricom International with Paul Allen. He is a co-founder of
the Institute for the Future, a Life Fellow of the IEEE and a
Fellow of the AAAS
[April 2001]
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