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Information about Paul Baran

For an economist with same name, see Paul A. Baran


Paul Baran (born April 29, 1926) was one of the two inventors of packet-switched networks, along with Donald Davies and Leonard Kleinrock. He was born in Poland, but his family moved to Boston 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.

The development of a communication network that would withstand a nuclear attack was important to US defence strategy. Baran developed his ideas for a distributed network as a solution to the problem of maintaining Command and Control of military resources in the event of a nuclear attack.

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 also founded Metricom, the first wireless Internet company which deployed the first public wireless mesh networking system and 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.

External links and references

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
For the computer scientist, see Paul Baran


Paul A. Baran (1910 - 1964) was an American economist known for his Marxist views. He was born in Russia, but had his academic career in the United States, teaching at Stanford University from 1949 until
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April 29 is the 1st day of the year (2nd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 0 days remaining.

Events

  • 1429 - Joan of Arc arrives to relieve the Siege of Orléans.

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19th century - 20th century - 21st century
1890s  1900s  1910s  - 1920s -  1930s  1940s  1950s
1923 1924 1925 - 1926 - 1927 1928 1929

Year 1926 (MCMXXVI
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Packet switching is a communications paradigm in which packets (discrete blocks of data) are routed between nodes over data links shared with other traffic. In each network node, packets are queued or buffered, resulting in variable delay.
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Donald Watts Davies CBE FRS (June 7, 1924 – May 28, 2000) was a British computer scientist who was a co-inventor of packet switching (and originator of the term), along with Paul Baran in the US.

Davies was born in Treorchy in the Rhondda Valley, Wales.
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Leonard Kleinrock, Ph.D. (born June 13, 1934 in New York) is a computer scientist, and a professor of computer science at UCLA, who made several important contributions to the field of computer networking, in particular to the theoretical side of computer networking.
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Motto
none1
Anthem
Mazurek Dąbrowskiego   (Polish)
Dąbrowski's Mazurek
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Boston, Massachusetts

Flag
Seal
Nickname: Beantown, The Hub (of the Universe), The Cradle of Liberty, City on the Hill, Athens of America
Location in Suffolk County in Massachusetts, USA
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19th century - 20th century - 21st century
1890s  1900s  1910s  - 1920s -  1930s  1940s  1950s
1925 1926 1927 - 1928 - 1929 1930 1931

Year 1928 (MCMXXVIII
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Drexel University is an institution of higher learning and research located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The school was founded in 1891 by Anthony J. Drexel, a noted financier and philanthropist. The current president is Constantine Papadakis.
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Bruins, NCAA Division I
Affiliations AAU
Pac 10
Nobel laureates 10
Website www.ucla.edu
The University of California, Los Angeles (generally known as UCLA) is a public research university located in Los Angeles, California, United States.
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Rand may refer to a number of places, people, organizations, and acronyms.

Places named Rand include:
  • Rand, New South Wales, a small town in Australia
  • Rand, Lincolnshire, a small village in Lincolnshire, England

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A telecommunications network is a of telecommunications links and nodes arranged so that messages may be passed from one part of the network to another over multiple links and through various nodes.
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Nuclear, or atomic warfare, is a war in which nuclear weapons are used. This has only happened once - the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States of America against the Empire of Japan near the end of World War II.
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Motto
"In God We Trust"   (since 1956)
"E Pluribus Unum"   ("From Many, One"; Latin, traditional)
Anthem
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The National Physical Laboratory (NPL) is the national measurement standards laboratory for the United Kingdom, based at Bushy Park in Teddington in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames.
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Motto
"Dieu et mon droit" [2]   (French)
"God and my right"
Anthem
"God Save the Queen" [3]
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StrataCom, Inc. was founded in Cupertino, California, USA, in January 1986 by 26 former employees of the failing Packet Technologies, Inc. StrataCom produced the first commercial cell switch, also known as a fast-packet switch.
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Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) is a cell relay, packet switching network and data link layer protocol which encodes data traffic into small (53 bytes; 48 bytes of data and 5 bytes of header information) fixed-sized cells.
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Modem (from modulate and demodulate) is a device that modulates an analog carrier signal to encode digital information, and also demodulates such a carrier signal to decode the transmitted information.
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Telebit was a US-based modem manufacturer, most notable for their TrailBlazer series of high-speed modems. One of the first modems to routinely exceed 9600 bit/s speeds, the TrailBlazer used a proprietary modulation scheme that proved highly resilient to interference,
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Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing (OFDM) — essentially identical to Coded OFDM (COFDM) — is a digital multi-carrier modulation scheme, which uses a large number of closely-spaced orthogonal sub-carriers.
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DSL or xDSL, is a family of technologies that provide digital data transmission over the wires of a local telephone network. DSL originally stood for digital subscriber loop, although in recent years, many have adopted digital subscriber line
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Metal detectors use electromagnetic induction to detect metal. Uses include de-mining (the detection of land mines), the detection of weapons such as knives and guns, especially at airports, geophysical prospecting, archaeology and treasure hunting.
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Gerald R. Ash (born in 1942 in Paterson, New Jersey) is an electrical engineer at AT&T Labs. His research has focused on routing problems; he is known for the development of Dynamic Non-Hierarchical Routing (DNHR).

Ash received his B.S.
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The IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal was instituted by the IEEE Board of Directors in 1976, commemorating the centennial of the invention of the telephone. It honors outstanding contributions in the field of telecommunications.
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C. Chapin Cutler (1914, Springfield, Massachusetts – November 30 2002, Waterford, Maine) was an American electrical engineer at Bell Labs. His notable achievements include the invention of the corrugated waveguide and differential pulse-code modulation (PCM).
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Arun N. Netravali (b. May 26, 1946 in Bombay) is an Indian-American engineer and businessman who is a pioneer of digital technology including HDTV. He conducted seminal research in digital compression, signal processing and other fields, including important collaborative work with
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