Internet pioneers

There have been many people who have aided in the creation and modernization of the internet. From Vannevar Bush to Claude Shannon, these people have supported the creation of the internet.

=Vannevar Bush=main|Vannevar Bush

Vannevar Bush helped to establish the U.S. military/university research partnership that later developed into ARPANET. He was appointed Chairman of the National Defense Research Committee in 1940 by President Roosevelt in order to help with World War II. One year later in 1941, Bush was appointed to Director of the "Office of Scientific Research and Development." This was created in order to coordinate weapons development research. By the end of the war, more than 6,000 scientists were employed to the Office of Scientific Research and Development, which also supervised the development of the atom bomb. From 1946 to 1947, he served as the chairman of the Joint Research and Development Board. Out of this would come DARPA, which in turn would lead to the ARPANET Project. [http://www.livinginternet.com/ Internet history, web, email ] ]

=Claude Shannon=main|Claude Shannon

Claude Shannon, dubbed "the father of modern information theory", published a "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" in 1948. Before Shannon, people believed that the only way of achieving arbitrarily small probability of error in a communication channel was to reduce the transmission rate to zero. This changed in 1948 with the publication of "A Mathematical Theory of Communication," where Shannon showed that with a single parameter channel, it was possible to transmit information at any rate below capacity with small probability of error. His paper established fundamental limits on the efficiency of communication over noisy channels, and presented the challenge of finding families of codes to achieve capacity. This method of random coding does not produce an explicit example of a good code, and it has taken fifty years for coding theorists to discover codes that come close to these fundamental limits on telephone channels. He created the idea that all information could be represented using ones and zeros, later calling these "bits". In 1936, Shannon won a Nobel Prize for his master's thesis titled, "A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits", which provided mathematical techniques for building a network of switches and relays to realize a specific logical function, such as a combination lock.

=J. C. R. Licklider=main|J. C. R. Licklider

Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider developed the idea of a universal network, spreading his vision throughout the IPTO, and inspiring his successors to realize his dreams by the creation of the ARPANET. He realized that interactive computers could provide more than a library function and could provide great value as automated assistants. In 1960, he captured his ideas in a paper called "Man-Computer Symbiosis", in which he described a computer assistant that could answer questions, perform simulation modeling, graphically display results, and extrapolate solutions for new situations from past experiences.

=Paul Baran=main|Paul Baran

Paul Baran developed the field of "packet switching" networks while conducting research at RAND Corporation. In 1959, he joined RAND from Hughes Aircraft's systems group. The U.S. Air Force had established one of the first wide-area computer networks for SAGE radar defense system, and had an increasing interest in wide area communication networks so they could diminish the chance of a first strike option by the Soviet Union. Baran began investigating the development of survivable communication networks, the results being presented to the Air Force in 1961 as briefing B-265, then as paper P-2626, then as a series of papers titled "On Distributed communications" [ [http://www.rand.org/about/history/baran.list.html About RAND | History and Mission | Paul Baran: Publications on Distributed Communications ] ] in 1964. His study describes a detailed architecture for a distributed survivable packet switched communications network. The network is designed to withstand almost any degree of damage, and since each computer could be connected to one or more other computers, it was assumed that any link of the network could fail at any time. Baran's design was created to withstand a nuclear conflict and helped convince the US military that wide area digital computer networks were a promising technology. He has received several awards including the IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal and the Marconi International Fellowship Award.

=Ted Nelson=main|Ted Nelson

Ted Nelson is a controversial figure in the computing world. He has had grand ideas, but none have turned into completed projects. His biggest project, Project Xanadu, was to be a worldwide electronic publishing system that would have created a sort of universal library for people. Nelson has continued to expound his ideas, but he did not possess the technical knowledge to tell others how his ideas could be implemented. Still, he persisted and in 1964, he named his system Xanadu, where with the help of computer hacks, has continued to develop. Xandu has never been totally completed and is far from being implemented. [ [http://www.ibiblio.org/pioneers Internet Pioneers ] ]

=Leonard Kleinrock=main|Leonard Kleinrock

Leonard Kleinrock is one of the pioneers of digital network communications and helped to build the early ARPANET. He published his first paper on digital network communications, "Information Flow in Large Communication Nets", in 1961. After completing his thesis in 1962, he moved to UCLA and later established the NMC, led by himself and consisting of a group of graduate students working in the area of digital networks. In 1966, Roberts joined the IPTO with a mandate to help the ARPANET. In 1969, a team at NMC connected one of their SDS Sigma 7 computers to an Interface Message Processor, thereby becoming the first node on ARPANET and the first ever computer on the Internet. As the ARPANET continued to grow, NMC stressed the system to work out the detailed design and performance issues involved with the world's first packet switched network. [ [http://www.lk.cs.ucla.edu/ Leonard Kleinrock's Home Page ] ]

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