Larry Roberts (computer scientist)
Lawrence Roberts | |
|---|---|
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 | |
| Fields | Computer science |
| Institutions | MIT Lincoln Laboratory, ARPA, Telenet |
| Academic advisors | Steven Anson Coons |
| 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, the first wide-area computer network to implement packet switching techniques invented by British computer scientist Donald Davies and American engineer Paul Baran. The ARPANET's principal designer was Bob Kahn, alongside several other computer scientists from Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN) who worked on the Interface Message Processors (IMPs) and their communication protocols. Roberts asked Leonard Kleinrock to apply mathematical methods to model and measure the performance of the network. In the 1970s, ARPA sponsored research on communication protocols for internetworking, using concepts pioneered by Louis Pouzin, that led to the development of the modern Internet.
After his work at ARPA, Roberts became CEO of the commercial packet-switching network Telenet, the first public data network in North America.