Lawrence Roberts, in full Lawrence Gilman Roberts, (born December 21, 1937, Westport, Connecticut, U.S.—died December 26, 2018, Redwood City, California), American pc scientist who supervised the development of the ARPANET, a pc community that was a precursor to the Internet.
Roberts obtained bachelor’s (1959), grasp’s (1960), and doctoral (1963) levels in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge. He then labored at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, Massachusetts, the place he studied communications networks. In February 1965 Roberts obtained a contract from the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which later turned the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), to develop an experimental pc community. In October of that 12 months, Roberts succeeded in connecting a pc at Lincoln Laboratory to a mainframe pc on the System Development Corporation in Santa Monica, California.
About that point, ARPA, which was funding pc analysis at a number of American universities, felt that analysis can be extra environment friendly if the assorted establishments may share pc assets over an ARPA-funded community, ARPANET. In 1966 Roberts was requested a number of instances to turn out to be director of the ARPANET. He refused however was ultimately persuaded to steer the mission. At an ARPANET assembly in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in April 1967, Roberts introduced the technical specs for the community. However, after the assembly, pc scientist Wesley Clark persuaded Roberts that the precise networking ought to be dealt with by smaller computer systems known as interface message processors (IMPs) relatively than the big mainframes that might be the nodes of ARPANET. Roberts modified the ARPANET plan to include Clark’s suggestion. On October 29, 1969, American pc scientist Leonard Kleinrock and his scholar Charley Kline despatched the primary message over ARPANET from an IMP and pc on the University of California, Los Angeles, to an IMP and pc at Stanford Research Institute (later SRI International) in Menlo Park, California. By the tip of 1969, the initially deliberate four-node ARPANET was full.
In 1969 Roberts turned director of the Information Processing Techniques Office at ARPA. In 1971 he wrote one of many first e-mail packages, RD, which for the primary time allowed customers to save lots of, delete, and manage their messages. In 1973 he based Telenet, the primary pc networking firm to make use of packet switching. The firm additionally developed X.25, which turned one of the vital well-liked networking protocols. Telenet was offered to GTE Corporation in 1979, and Roberts left the corporate in 1980.
In 1983 Roberts turned chairman and chief govt officer of NetExpress, an organization that produced networking gear utilizing the asynchronous switch mode (ATM) protocol. In 1993 he turned president of ATM Systems. However, ATM was ultimately supplanted by networking gadgets utilizing Internet Protocol (IP), and he left ATM Systems in 1998.
In 1999 Roberts based Caspian Networks, which developed routers that labored not on particular person packets however on the general kind of a message to prioritize it accordingly. He left Caspian Networks in 2004 and that very same 12 months based Anagran Inc., which additionally developed IP routers. He obtained the Charles Stark Draper Prize from the National Academy of Engineering in 2001.