Howard Frank
lorenetworking
The engineer who decided where the ARPANET's links should actually go, treating network shape as an optimisation problem.
Somebody had to choose which sites connected to which, and how many links were enough to survive failures without paying for redundancy nobody needed. He came to that question from work on the survivability of national assets in wartime and from optimising pipeline networks, which is why the answer arrived as operations research rather than as engineering intuition. The topology of the first network was a calculation, and the discipline he founded - designing a network by analysing it before building it - is the one every capacity plan since has been an instance of.
Also known as: frank, network analysis corporation, topology
Sources
- Howard Frank, 4 June 1941 to 1 May 2017, network engineer who laid the groundwork for analysing and designing computer networks; PhD 1965, consultant to the Office of Emergency Preparedness, founder of Network Analysis Corporation, later at DARPA and dean at Maryland; Presidential Distinguished Service Medal and Internet Hall of Fame
- Charles Babbage Institute oral history: Frank's background, the founding of Network Analysis Corporation, his ARPANET work and his interaction with Roberts, the IPT Office, BBN and Kleinrock