Paul Baran

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

Paul Baran (born 1926) was one of the developers of packet switched networks with Donald Davies. He was born in Poland, but his family moved to Boston in 1928. He 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 U.S. 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 U.K..

Paul also provided a spark of invention to two 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. In both cases, he provided early ideas and gave credibility to strong groups of developers who then took those ideas far beyond Paul's orginal spark.

In addition to his innovation in networking products, he is also credited with inventing the metal detector used in airports.

He is a kindly person with a twinkle of creativity in his eye.

External links

• ibilio.org entry