Paul Baran

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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

Paul Baran (born 1926) was one of the developers 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 packet-switched networks as a solution.

Similar ideas were also being independently pursued by Donald Davies from the National Physical Laboratory in the UK and Leonard Kleinrock at MIT.

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.