There are most likely multiple routes the data could take, because there’s more than one way to get from A to B. Let’s say that you have a bunch of computers that are connected together, and that you want to send data from Computer A to Computer B. In a nutshell, her solution is what we call a spanning tree. Eventually she made her way to DEC, where her solution met with more receptive ears….and the rest is history. She persisted, though, because she believed in herself and she also believed in her solution. “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-1970s, 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. Unfortunately, her first attempts met with….well, I’ll let this snippet from a 2006 article in Investor’s Business Daily tell the story: Perlman’s most famous contribution-the one that earned her her nickname-solved a particularly thorny problem in the early days of computer networks: how do we ensure that data gets to its intended destination without getting hopelessly lost, or going in circles? How can we determine the path that data should take when going from one place to another? (If you consider for a second just how many millions of computers, smart phones, appliances, and other devices exchange information over computer networks-well, you get a sense for just how important this problem is not only to solve, but to get right!) The talk was very interesting and thought-provoking, and afterwards I got to speak to her for a few minutes one on one-one of the highlights of that conference for me!)ĭr. Perlman speak at Grace Hopper in San Diego in 2006-she presented some of her more recent security work. She has nearly 100 patents in networking and security technology and has authored two widely-used and innovative textbooks. She’s worked for many big-name companies throughout her career, from BBN to DEC to Novell to Sun. She earned bachelors and masters degrees in mathematics from MIT in the 1970s and a PhD in computer science from MIT in 1988. Perlman is a Fellow at Intel, and has spent her career working on computer networking and computer security. It’s her algorithm that makes it possible for data to traverse the Internet, thus earning her the nickname “Mother of the Internet”.ĭr. Click here for the Women in Computing timeline created for that event.The next time you visit Facebook, do a search on Google, waste time on YouTube, or do anything online, stop and thank Radia Perlman. Radia Perlman was one of the women profiled in our Women in Computing Festival 2017 of entitled Where Did All the Women Go?. “It's astonishing that internet search is possible at all but it works amazingly well, and is probably one of the most important reasons that the internet is ubiquitous,” she says. Radia’s take on the internet is that its success isn’t due to the specific technologies it involves, but rather the surprising ways it has come to be used. Her concept was adopted as an IEEE standard for bridge technology and remains in place to this day. Her employer, DEC, had wanted to network computers reliably and Radia’s solution did that and more it also served to establish the rules for internet traffic. Working under the supervision of Seymour Papert at MIT, Radia developed a child-friendly version of the robotics language LOGO and in 1974-6 young children (from just 3ó years old) programmed a LOGO educational robot called a Turtle.įollowing her years at MIT, Radia went on to become a leader in computer science, developing the algorithm behind the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP), an innovation that made today’s internet possible. Radia was a pioneer in teaching young children computer programming. Radia’s mother was a computer programmer, although her job title in the 1950s when Radia was born was ‘mathematician’ and she had little influence on her daughter’s subsequent choice of career. Radia Perlman was drawn into programming while she was at MIT in the 1970s where less than 5% of students on her course were female.
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