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Monday, March 28, 2011

Notable but not widely noted losses of great men.

Earlier today I was talking with a young network engineer about the convergence of wired and wireless networks when I mentioned that it was a sad day for networking with the death of Paul Baran. The blank look on his face told me that he has no idea who Paul Baran was. remarkably, the passing of Paul Baran has gone largely unnoticed by the people who have benefitted most from his accomplishments and discoveries. Although I may have had more direct opportunity to know who Paul Baran was, through work with early Government networks and as an early user of the Ricochet service he developed, there is not an Internet or wireless user today who does not owe him a debt of gratitude.

My earlier conversation today reminded me of another great man's passing recently. Ken Olsen, co-founder of Digital Equipment Corporation (or to most of us from Central Massachusettes, just "DEC") died on Feb 6th of this year. Ken played with radios as a kid, served in the Navy in WWII, and went back to school as an adult getting his MS EE from MIT. Like Paul Baran, Ken Olsen benefitted from the US military's sponsorship of research into early computing and networking capabilities. The realization that interactive computing using resources that could scale down smaller and more accessible than mainframe computing led directly to the systems now used by almost every corporation, software and service provider in the world. To the end Ken was an engineer to the end and fostered environments that rewarded engineering excellence and the pursuit of innovation.

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