8/31/2023 0 Comments Radia perlman![]() Soon after, a teaching assistant at MIT enlisted Perlman to help him. She took a class in programming and passed. She built on her knack for numbers and enrolled in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1969. “Every time there was a new subject or a quiz I would be very excited at the opportunity to solve all sorts of puzzles,” she said. Math and science really energized Perlman.Įarly on she discovered she could puzzle out problems easily. That’s the kind of thing you can think about in your mind without worrying about getting electrocuted or breaking something.” “I had overprotective parents who convinced me that if I ever tried to touch anything more than an off/on switch I would be electrocuted,” she said. Perlman learned much through observation and analysis, because she sure wasn’t hands-on. Her mother worked as a computer programmer for the military as a civilian employee. He later worked for the government as a radar technician. Her interest in information technology is no surprise both her parents had engineering backgrounds. Perlman, 54, was born in Portsmouth, Va., but grew up mostly in New Jersey. ![]() “It doesn’t deliver the data it keeps the network configured so that it can deliver the data.” “The spanning tree algorithm is something that’s in there that is completely taken for granted,” he said. But Web surfing wouldn’t be the same without it, says Anthony Lauck, a consultant and Perlman’s former boss at now-defunct Digital Equipment Corp. The average Internet user doesn’t see Perlman’s work. “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,” he said. Her software acts like a virtual road map for moving information on the streets of the Internet, says Greg Papadopoulos, chief technology officer for Sun. Perlman’s work comes into play each time an Internet user calls up a Web search service such as Google or Dogpile. Her spanning tree algorithm - software that helps direct information traffic on the Internet - earned her the nickname “Mother of the Internet.” Perlman, now a distinguished engineer for Sun Microsystems specializing in network security, has helped speed up and protect data that move along computer network systems. Perlman believed in herself and got people to listen - fortunately for computer users. “Some people don’t make as much of an impact on things as they can because they don’t believe in themselves enough or they don’t know how to get people to listen to them,” she said. But she didn’t let anyone deter her career. ![]() “At the end of the meeting, the organizers still called for a solution after I had just given them one, which really irked me,” she said. But the event organizers ignored her findings. It was the mid-1970 s, and Perlman was a software designer for computer network communication systems - and one of the few women in the field.Īt a vendor meeting where engineers were asked to help with the routing problem, Perlman spent 30 minutes illustrating her solution with an overhead projector. ![]() Radia Perlman had a solution for an information routing problem. (And, for the record, I think in the picture at right she is posing as a “spanning tree”) The “Mother Of The Internet’ Puzzle Solver: Radia Perlman’s determination helped make Web surfing a reality Perlman from Investor’s Business Daily earlier this year. Radia Perlman ’73, SM ’76, PhD ’88, Distinguished Engineer for Sun Microsystems, inventor of the spanning tree algorithm (!).Ĭheck out this article about Dr. To follow up on my recent entry about women in engineering: did you know about the MIT alumna who is known as the “Mother of the Internet”? Meet Dr.
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