Lawrence Roberts | |
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![]() Roberts in 2017 | |
Born | Lawrence Gilman Roberts December 21, 1937 Westport, Connecticut, U.S. |
Died | December 26, 2018 | (aged 81)
Alma mater | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
Known for | ARPANET, founding father of the Internet |
Awards |
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Scientific career | |
Institutions | Lincoln Lab, ARPA, Telenet |
Website | packet |
Notes | |
Larry Roberts (December 21, 1937 – December 26, 2018) was an American computer scientist and Internet pioneer.
As a program manager and later office director at the Advanced Research Projects Agency, Roberts and his team created the ARPANET using packet switching techniques invented by British computer scientist Donald Davies and American engineer Paul Baran.[4][5] The ARPANET's principal designer was Bob Kahn who worked at Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN). Roberts asked Leonard Kleinrock to apply mathematical methods to model and measure the performance of the network, which was a predecessor to the modern Internet.
Roberts later was CEO of the commercial packet-switching network Telenet, the first public data network in North America.
The manager of the ARPANET project, Lawrence Roberts, assembled a large team of computer scientists ... and he drew on the ideas of network experimenters in the United States and the United Kingdom.
Historians credit seminal insights to Welsh scientist Donald W. Davies and American engineer Paul Baran