Paul Baran's Passing

Polish-born engineerPaul Baran died this week in Palo Alto, at age 84. [Aside: the number of important figures in the history of computing who were born to Jewish families in Eastern Europe before World War II and later emigrated to the U.S. is quite astounding; computing must rival physics in this regard.] He is best known as one of the originators of communications based on "message blocks" (a.k.a packets), while working at RAND Corporation in the early 1960s. Baran was involved in the history of computing throughout his career, however, both before and after his RAND stint. As a young Drexler graduate he worked on the UNIVAC at the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation (EMCC). From the 1970s onward, he founded several companies in the computer networking business, including one that advised ARPA, which had no interest in being in the network operations business, on how to divest itself of ARPANET. He also co-founded the (very late-1960s) Institute for the Future in 1968, which survives to this day. In happier news, tomorrow is the 30th Anniversary of the announcement of the Osborne 1 "luggable" computer!

Image Source: Network diagrams from Paul Baran's "On Distributed Communications"