PART VIII: The Unknown History of the Internet
Andreu Veà Baró andreu@veabaro.info September 2003
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“...From time to time I’ve been assigned credit for all sorts of things that I
haven’t done. For example, I am not responsible for the ARPANET. Its
initiator was Robert Taylor, and it was project-managed by Larry Roberts”.
PAUL BARAN – The Beginnings of Packet Switching (RAND Corporation)
paul@baran.com
How the author of packet switching (foundation of modern communica-
tions), sees his work after 40 years.
Interviewed September 27, 2003 in Atherton (CA)
Born on April 29,th 1926 in Grodno, Poland
(now Belarus) and moved to the USA at two
years of age, “the best decision I’ve ever made”
:-)
Received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from
Drexel Univ. in 1949 and an M.S. in E.E. from
UCLA in 1959. Worked for Hughes Aircraft
Company and joined the RAND Corporation1,
where working on a system
for U.S.
telecommunications infrastructure to survive a
"first strike,"2 conceived the ideas that became
foundations of the Internet and digital packet
switching.
http://www.rand.org
http://www.com21.com
Since the 1970s, as an entrepreneur and private investor, he started seven3
Silicon Valley companies, of which five became public companies. At the time of
the interview he serves as a trustee-director for several non-profit organizations
including the Charles Babbage Foundation, the IEEE History Center, and the
Marconi International Fellowship. He holds 30 US patents and has received
numerous professional honors.
1
RAND was established by the US Air Force to preserve the operations research capability created by the Air Force in
World War II and to work on issues of national security. According to Baran, the freedom of the staff to choose
projects, try novel approaches, and disagree with the bureaucracy is difficult to imagine in the present environment.
2
This w as in URSS-USA Cold War times. He was f