Everything about Paul Baran totally explained
» For an economist with same name, see Paul A. Baran
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
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 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's also credited with inventing the
metal detector used in airports.
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