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Paul Baran (born April 29, 1926) was one of the three inventors of packet-switched networks, along with Donald Davies and Leonard Kleinrock. He was born in Grodno (then Poland), but his family moved to Philadelphia in 1928. Baran did undergraduate work at Drexel University, obtained his Masters degree in Engineering from UCLA in 1959 and began working for the RAND Corporation in the same year.
Similar ideas for a distributed data network were being independently pursued by Donald Davies from the National Physical Laboratory in the UK, although Davies was primarily concerned with the problem of resource-sharing rather than Baran's focus on military issues.
Baran also provided a spark of invention to four other important networking technologies. He was involved in the origin of the packet voice technology developed by StrataCom at its predecessor, Packet Technologies. This technology led to the first commercial pre-standard ATM product. He was also involved with the discrete multitone modem technology developed by Telebit, which was one of the roots of Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing which is used in DSL modems. Paul Baran founded Metricom, the first wireless Internet company, which deployed Ricochet, the first public wireless mesh networking system. He also founded Com21, an early cable modem company. In all cases, he provided early ideas and gave credibility to strong groups of developers who then took those ideas far beyond Baran's original spark.
Paul Baran also extended his work in packet switching to wireless-spectrum theory, developing what he called "kindergarten rules" for the use of wireless spectrum.
In addition to his innovation in networking products, he is also credited with inventing the metal detector used in airports.
| Awards | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by Gerald R. Ash and Billy B. Oliver |
IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal 1990 |
Succeeded by C. Chapin Cutler, John O. Limb and Arun Netravali |
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