Radia Perlman cited as "Mother of the Internet"

Sat Feb 11 08:30:00 PST 2006

For those who don't get ACM's TechNews clipping service, I thought this
item might be interesting, since Radia spoke at one of our meetings not
too long ago.

----- Forwarded message from TechNews <technews at HQ.ACM.ORG> -----

Date:         Fri, 10 Feb 2006 12:54:06 -0500
From: TechNews <technews at HQ.ACM.ORG>
Subject: ACM TechNews; Friday, February 10, 2006
To: TECHNEWS at LISTSERV.ACM.ORG

Read the TechNews Online at: http://technews.acm.org

(c) 2006 INFORMATION, INC.
This service may be reproduced for internal distribution.

ACM TechNews; Friday, February 10, 2006
...
******************** News Stories ************************
...

"The 'Mother' of the Internet"
Investor's Business Daily (02/09/06) P. A4; Barlas, Peter

Radia Perlman says when she proposed a solution for routing information to
a group of vendors in the mid 1970s, she was largely ignored, due mainly to
her gender.  But Perlman, now a distinguished engineer at Sun Microsystems,
was not to be deterred.  Though she frequently found her audiences
dismissive over the years, Perlman's spanning tree algorithm, which helps
direct network traffic, became so embedded in the Internet's structure that
she has been dubbed the "Mother of the Internet."  Any time a user searches
through an engine such as Google, Perlman's algorithm forms a sort of road
map to navigate the Internet.  "What Radia did was to put the basic traffic
rules into place so it was possible to drive from one point to another
without hopelessly getting lost or driving in circles," said Sun CTO Greg
Papadopoulos.  Perlman attended MIT and took her first paying job teaching
programming to children at one of the school's labs.  She has always taken
a mathematical approach to linking information among computers, describing
concrete numbers as a way to cut through the syntactical denseness of
computer language.  A manager for Digital Equipment watched Perlman's
vendor presentation, and offered her a job.  Starting at Digital in 1980,
she immediately solved the information exchange problem that had confounded
the engineering team for months.  Despite her field experience, Perlman
continued her education and earned a Ph.D. in computer science from MIT in
1988.  She has worked at Novell and then Sun, where she developed software
that shored up the routing of simple multicast systems, keeping a site
running when it is bombarded by traffic.  For the past few years Perlman
has also taught at the University of Washington and Harvard, as well as
written articles and books.

For information about ACM's Committee on Women and Computing, visit
http://www.acm.org/women
http://www.investors.com/editorial/IBDArticles.asp?artsec=21&issue=20060208
...

----- End forwarded message -----

Peace,
david
-- 
David H. Wolfskill				david at catwhisker.org
Mail filters, like sewers, need to be most restrictive at the point of entry.

See http://www.catwhisker.org/~david/publickey.gpg for my public key.