Age, Biography and Wiki

Paul Baran was born on 29 April, 1926 in Grodno, Poland (now Belarus), is an American-Jewish engineer. Discover Paul Baran's Biography, Age, Height, Physical Stats, Dating/Affairs, Family and career updates. Learn How rich is he in this year and how he spends money? Also learn how he earned most of networth at the age of 85 years old?

Popular As N/A
Occupation N/A
Age 85 years old
Zodiac Sign Taurus
Born 29 April, 1926
Birthday 29 April
Birthplace Grodno, Poland (now Belarus)
Date of death 2011
Died Place Palo Alto, California, U.S.
Nationality Belarus

We recommend you to check the complete list of Famous People born on 29 April. He is a member of famous engineer with the age 85 years old group.

Paul Baran Height, Weight & Measurements

At 85 years old, Paul Baran height not available right now. We will update Paul Baran's Height, weight, Body Measurements, Eye Color, Hair Color, Shoe & Dress size soon as possible.

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Who Is Paul Baran's Wife?

His wife is Evelyn Murphy Baran, PhD

Family
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Wife Evelyn Murphy Baran, PhD
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Paul Baran Net Worth

His net worth has been growing significantly in 2023-2024. So, how much is Paul Baran worth at the age of 85 years old? Paul Baran’s income source is mostly from being a successful engineer. He is from Belarus. We have estimated Paul Baran's net worth, money, salary, income, and assets.

Net Worth in 2024 $1 Million - $5 Million
Salary in 2024 Under Review
Net Worth in 2023 Pending
Salary in 2023 Under Review
House Not Available
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Source of Income engineer

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Timeline

1926

Paul Baran (born Pesach Baran ; April 29, 1926 – March 26, 2011) was an American-Jewish engineer who was a pioneer in the development of computer networks.

He was one of the two independent inventors of packet switching, which is today the dominant basis for data communications in computer networks worldwide, and went on to start several companies and develop other technologies that are an essential part of modern digital communication.

He was born in Grodno (then in the Second Polish Republic, and since 1945 part of Belarus) on April 29, 1926.

He was the youngest of three children in his Lithuanian Jewish family, with the Yiddish given name "Pesach".

1928

His family moved to the United States on May 11, 1928, settling in Boston and later in Philadelphia, where his father, Morris "Moshe" Baran (1884–1979), opened a grocery store.

1949

He graduated from Drexel University (then called Drexel Institute of Technology) in 1949, with a degree in electrical engineering.

He then joined the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Company, where he did technical work on UNIVAC models, the first brand of commercial computers in the United States.

1955

In 1955 he married Evelyn Murphy, moved to Los Angeles, and worked for Hughes Aircraft on radar data processing systems.

1959

He obtained his master's degree in engineering from UCLA in 1959, with advisor Gerald Estrin while he took night classes.

His thesis was on character recognition.

While Baran initially stayed on at UCLA to pursue his doctorate, a heavy travel and work schedule forced him to abandon his doctoral work.

After joining the RAND Corporation in 1959, Baran took on the task of designing a "survivable" communications system that could maintain communication between end points in the face of damage from nuclear weapons during the Cold War.

Then, most American military communications used high-frequency connections, which could be put out of action for many hours by a nuclear attack.

Baran decided to automate RAND Director Franklin R. Collbohm's previous work with emergency communication over conventional AM radio networks and showed that a distributed relay node architecture could be survivable.

The Rome Air Development Center soon showed that the idea was practicable.

Using the minicomputer technology of the day, Baran and his team developed a simulation suite to test basic connectivity of an array of nodes with varying degrees of linking.

That is, a network of n-ary degree of connectivity would have n links per node.

The simulation randomly "killed" nodes and subsequently tested the percentage of nodes that remained connected.

The result of the simulation revealed that networks in which n ≥ 3 had a significant increase in resilience against even as much as 50% node loss.

Baran's insight gained from the simulation was that redundancy was the key.

1960

His first work was published as a RAND report in 1960, with more papers generalizing the techniques in the next two years.

After proving survivability, Baran and his team needed to show proof of concept for that design so that it could be built.

That involved high-level schematics detailing the operation, construction, and cost of all the components required to construct a network that leveraged the new insight of redundant links.

The result was one of the first store-and-forward data layer switching protocols, a link-state/distance vector routing protocol, and an unproved connection-oriented transport protocol.

1964

Explicit detail of the designs can be found in the complete series of reports On Distributed Communications, published by RAND in 1964.

The design flew in the face of telephony design of the time by placing inexpensive and unreliable nodes at the center of the network and more intelligent terminating 'multiplexer' devices at the endpoints.

In Baran's words, unlike the telephone company's equipment, his design did not require expensive "gold plated" components to be reliable.

The Distributed Network that Baran introduced was intended to route around damage.

It provided connection to others through many points, not one centralized connection.

Fundamental to the scheme was the division of the information into "blocks" before they were sent out across the network.

That enabled the data to travel faster and communications lines to be used more efficiently.

Each block was sent separately, traveling different paths and rejoining into a whole when they were received at their destination.

After the publication of On Distributed Communications, he presented the findings of his team to a number of audiences, including AT&T engineers (not to be confused with Bell Labs engineers, who at the time provided Paul Baran with the specifications for the first generation of T1 circuit that he used as the links in his network design proposal).

In subsequent interviews, Baran mentioned how the AT&T engineers scoffed at his idea of non-dedicated physical circuits for voice communications, at times claiming that Baran simply did not understand how voice telecommunication worked.

Donald Davies, at the National Physical Laboratory in the United Kingdom, also thought of the same idea and implemented a trial network.

While Baran used the term "message blocks" for his units of communication, Davies used the term "packets," as it was capable of being translated into languages other than English without compromise.

He applied the concept to a general-purpose computer network.

Davies's key insight came in the realization that computer network traffic was inherently "bursty" with periods of silence, compared with relatively-constant telephone traffic.

1967

It was in fact Davies's work on packet switching, not Baran's, that initially caught the attention of the developers of ARPANET at the Symposium on Operating Systems Principles in October 1967.

Baran was happy to acknowledge that Davies had come up with the same idea as him independently.