Lawrence Roberts (scientist)

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Lawrence G. Roberts is one of the four persons most closely associated with the birth of the Internet, the other three being Leonard Kleinrock, Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf.

The following is taken from his old personal homepage.

Lawrence G. Roberts is currently Chairman and CTO of Packetcom, Inc.. Packetcom is designing advanced IP router/switches with improved QoS for the Internet.

Dr. Roberts has B.S., M.S., and PhD. Degrees from MIT. In 1967 he joined ARPA to manage a wide range of computer-communication research and development for the government. While at ARPA he was responsible for the design, initiation, planning and development of ARPANET, the world's first major packet network, now called the Internet.

After ARPA, Dr. Roberts founded the world’s first packet data communications carrier, Telenet, and was the CEO from 1973 to 1980. Telenet was sold to GTE in 1979 and subsequently became the data division of Sprint. In 1982, Dr. Roberts became President and CEO of DHL Corporation. From 1983 to 1993, Dr. Roberts was Chairman and CEO of NetExpress, Inc., an electronics company specializing in packetized facsimile and ATM equipment.

From 1993 to 1998 Dr. Roberts was President of ATM Systems, a division of Connectware, Inc., an AMP company. At ATM Systems he has designed an advanced ATM Enterprise Switch with Explicit Rate ABR for the Enterprise and carrier network market and an Ethernet switch with QOS and Explicit Rate flow control. He proposed explicit rate to the ATM Forum in 1994 and spearheaded its development into the ATM Forum recommendation TM 4.0 in 1996. He has also led the development of a protocol for ATM over Ethernet called Cells In Frames.

[edit] Awards received

Secretary of Defense Meritorious Service Medal
Harry Goode Memorial Award from the American Federation of Information Processing
IEEE Computer Pioneer Award
Interface Conference Award
L.M. Ericsson prize for research in data communications
IEEE Computer Society W. Wallace McDowell Award
ACM SIGCOMM communications award for "Visionary Contributions and Advanced Technology Development of Computer Communication Networks"