Aaron Swartz, Internet activist, pioneer and innovator, died on Friday. He was 26. 

Swartz committed suicide in his New York apartment, according to his family. 

(For more on the case, see The Persecution Of Aaron Schwartz, by ReadWrite's Jon Mitchell.)

Swartz was best known for creating RSS when he was 14 and later as a founding member of Reddit and Demand Progress. 

Swartz was facing legal challenges in the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts from an incident in 2011 following the unauthorized download of 4.8 million scientific and literary papers from the digital database JSTOR through the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. If found guilty, Swartz could have faced 35 years in prison and a $1 million fine.

By reports, Swartz had been dealing with depression - in part due to his legal troubles. To its credit, JSTOR had more or less forgiven Swartz for the transgression and recently made a limited supply of its digital archives available for free. MIT and the U.S. District Court were not quite as forgiving.

At the time of the indictment, Demand Progress issued a statement calling Swartz’s actions akin to, ”checking out too many library books.” In a now-infamous statement, the U.S. District Court said, "stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars."

The family, friends and partner of Swartz issued a public statement on Saturday, calling his death the “product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death.” The full statement is below.

Our beloved brother, son, friend, and partner Aaron Swartz hanged himself on Friday in his Brooklyn apartment. We are in shock, and have not yet come to terms with his passing.

Aaron’s insatiable curiosity, creativity, and brilliance; his reflexive empathy and capacity for selfless, boundless love; his refusal to accept injustice as inevitable—these gifts made the world, and our lives, far brighter. We’re grateful for our time with him, to those who loved him and stood with him, and to all of those who continue his work for a better world.

Aaron’s commitment to social justice was profound, and defined his life. He was instrumental to the defeat of an Internet censorship bill; he fought for a more democratic, open, and accountable political system; and he helped to create, build, and preserve a dizzying range of scholarly projects that extended the scope and accessibility of human knowledge. He used his prodigious skills as a programmer and technologist not to enrich himself but to make the Internet and the world a fairer, better place. His deeply humane writing touched minds and hearts across generations and continents. He earned the friendship of thousands and the respect and support of millions more.

Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy. It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Decisions made by officials in the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s office and at MIT contributed to his death. The US Attorney's office pursued an exceptionally harsh array of charges, carrying potentially over 30 years in prison, to punish an alleged crime that had no victims. Meanwhile, unlike JSTOR, MIT refused to stand up for Aaron and its own community’s most cherished principles.

Today, we grieve for the extraordinary and irreplaceable man that we have lost.

On Sunday, MIT issued a public response on the death of Swartz, in an email to the press from MIT president L. Rafael Reif:

“I want to express very clearly that I and all of us at MIT are extremely saddened by the death of this promising young man who touched the lives of so many. It pains me to think that MIT played any role in a series of events that have ended in tragedy,” 

“I will not attempt to summarize here the complex events of the past two years. Now is a time for everyone involved to reflect on their actions, and that includes all of us at MIT. I have asked Professor Hal Abelson to lead a thorough analysis of MIT's involvement from the time that we first perceived unusual activity on our network in fall 2010 up to the present. I have asked that this analysis describe the options MIT had and the decisions MIT made, in order to understand and to learn from the actions MIT took. I will share the report with the MIT community when I receive it,” Reif wrote.

Swartz’s funeral will be held on Tuesday, January 15th at Central Avenue Synagogue, 874 Central Avenue, Highland Park, Illinois 60035. The specific time of the funeral as well as remembrances and donations can be found at the site http://rememberaaronsw.com

NOTE: As of Monday, the Justice Department has dropped its charges against Swartz today, citing his death

Top image courtesy Wikipedia.

I'll call him Jack, for reasons I'll explain in a bit.

His Commodore Business Machines was already a two-decades-old firm, and perhaps the first retail manufacturer of pocket-sized calculators (there's conflicting evidence), by the time he conceived a way to sell fully functional personal computers.

In 1976, Jack didn't just buy MOS Technology's 6502 microprocessor (based on Motorola's 6800), he bought MOS Technology itself, along with its creator, the legendary Chuck Peddle. That purchase led to the creation of the Commodore PET (Personal Electronic Transactor), and if you still think Steve Jobs invented the personal computer, realize that Jack's acquisition of MOS made Jobs' and Woz' design decisions possible.

One of my first personal computers was a Commodore PET 2001 which, despite the numeral, was actually made in 1977. It was an early edition, meaning it had the "Chiclet" keys rather than the standard keyboard layout, produced by Commodore's calculator division back before full QWERTY-style computer keyboards became marketable.

The PET 2001 is as indicative of Jack Tramiel's personality as anything he or any of his companies would ever produce. I still have my old PET, and last I checked, it still worked. It had a steel case like a microwave oven and a shape like some "Mr. Computer" character in a children's TV show, with a tapered roof for the screen that seemed to merge Napoleon's hat and the old NET TV logo. It had 8K of RAM, which I leveraged to create a lunar lander game (for the 10th anniversary of Apollo 11), a MasterMind game (guess the four-digit sequence) and an American History quiz generator.

I pitched all of these to Commodore at one time or another, for distribution through its software channels. (You could mail-order a program, and it would come to you on a cassette tape - an ordinary audio cassette - in a plastic bag.) While my pitches were all rejected, the rejections came on formal business stationary signed by human beings.

This was how a Jack Tramiel company did business. He was perhaps the first businessman to understand the personal computer business as just another business, another way to access the customer. And as just another businessman (which is what he truly was, and would want to be remembered as), he knew how to build relationships with customers, with suppliers and with supporters.

Jack and his sons, Gary, Sam, and Leonard - all of whom were involved in the family business - were perhaps the most accessible executives of any computer company I've ever encountered. In my first escapades as a correspondent covering the computer industry, I'd call up the company and leave my name with a secretary - not a PR person, but a real secretary. And in a half-hour or so, I'd get a call back from one of the Tramiels, and we'd spend a another half-hour discussing everything I needed to understand about the way business works. Here I was, perhaps the only serious writer in the business with a 405 area code, getting same-day callbacks from a CEO or president or executive VP.

Every die-hard computer programmer of the early 1980s was a loyalist to one brand or another. I was an Atarian. When the Commodore 64 - which I rejected as an Atari 8-bit ripoff - became the best-selling computer in history, the reason was because the Tramiels were better businesspeople. The C64 wasn't really a better computer, but it wasn't bad, and it sold for a better price point. It had a better software base, and was visible through more retail channels. No other businessperson in the 1980s could have pulled off the C64.

So even though the Tramiels were the "opposition" I could share my feelings openly with them, and they'd be happy to argue with me. Usually Leonard, though more than once Jack joined in shouting talking points into the speakerphone.

All this changed in 1984, when the Tramiels exited Commodore, purchased my beloved Atari, and built Atari Corp. Perhaps the reason I got my first regular column at an Atari magazine called ANALOG Computing was because I could get a Tramiel on the telephone.

The Tramiels wanted to produce a new 16/32-bit architecture machine called the Amiga. It was no secret, because the Tramiels kept no secrets - whenever they decided to do something, step one was to put out an announcement. When Commodore scooped up the Amiga instead, Jack and Sam Tramiel tasked former Commodore designer Shiraz Shivji to break out a back-drawer design for something they wanted to do at Commodore - a business machine capable of doing Macintosh-style graphics in color and, of course, for less money.

The Atari ST was a brilliant device, and the focus of about five years of my working life. Based on the same Motorola 68000 chip that ran the Mac, it enabled families to purchase a complete computing system with a working laser printer for less than $1,000. Compared to anything else built at the time, including the IBM PC AT, it was supremely fast at number crunching. Nicknamed the "Jackintosh," it wasn't much of a secret that "ST" didn't really stand for "sixteen/thirty-two" but for "Sam Tramiel," just as the "busy bee" icon was essentially the family crest, the Polish "trzmiel." (Born in Poland in 1928, Tramiel survived Auschwitz, and emigrated to the U.S. after the war.)

The ST was not a ripoff of the Macintosh or the Amiga, though it did attempt to capitalize on their success of the former. But while it had the most innovative hardware of its day, it struggled against the notion that better hardware was just around the corner - a notion put into buyers' heads by the Tramiels themselves, who never could keep quiet about what was to come later. Unfortunately, what was to come sometimes never came at all.

Other times - the Atari TT and the Jaguar, for example - it came way too late to make a difference. Jack Tramiel played by an old set of rules that was perfectly legitimate, honorable, and competitive for an earlier era. When Apple changed the game, the Tramiels didn't change with it.

And that's a shame, because Jack Tramiel's stubbornness has kept him from his rightful place among the giants who helped create the personal computer.

The PET 2001, the Commodore 64, and the Atari ST are three of the most important consumer products ever produced. Although only one was a huge financial success, the way you use your PC and your tablet and your smartphone all depend on the paths blazed by those three devices. Jack was the rare tech-company leader with true retail consumer product experience. He didn't invent anything, but he set many of this industry's wheels in motion, and we all owe him a huge debt for doing so.

I know you're thinking Xerox PARC. Actually, I was thinking the Ford Motor Company.

America used to produce automobiles, and with the surplus generated from the country's post-war appetite for mobility and horsepower, it produced other things just for the heck of it. In the 1950s, IBM had a research laboratory. Because IBM had one, to stay competitive, GE - Big Blue's chief competition - established one. Because GE was a consumer products company with a science lab, General Motors established a science lab. It was the in thing to do. And finally, because GM had a science lab, Ford built one.

Since Ford was a defense contractor, and World War II (particularly the way it ended in the Eastern hemisphere) proved the country's need for scientific prowess, it hired a physics professor straight out of the Army Signal Corps to lead its research and development team. This was Michael Ference, Jr. Tasked by Chairman Henry Ford II with the responsibility of putting Ford in the lead in developing totally electric vehicles, in 1959 Ference hired Jacob E. "Jack" Goldman, chief of the magnetics tech lab at Carnegie Tech University (now Carnegie-Mellon), and two years earlier the author of a breakthrough work in industrial design research entitled The Science of Engineering Materials.

Under Goldman's leadership, Ford recruited the best and brightest engineers, for what would become one of the greatest braintrusts ever assembled by an American corporation. That this braintrust ended up with little to show for its efforts was not really a problem, as history would go on to reveal.

In a 1996 interview for Caltech University, Terry Cole - a former colleague of Goldman's and a senior staff member at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory - recounted the unique and perhaps unrepeatable experience of working with that team, at that time:

Essentially, Jack's approach was, "We want you to come here. We'll provide you with all the money and all the resources you need. And what we want from you is the best science that you're capable of. And you choose the topic." So it was carte blanche. It was an era that probably won't be duplicated again for a very long time. And for somebody either starting out or early in their career, it was just wonderful, because the U.S. automobile companies then virtually owned a license to make money. There was no Japanese competition in the 1950s. The public was still starved for automobiles, because there was still a lingering shortage from the Second World War. And big cars with lots of chrome and big engines that made big profits for the company, so that there was lots of money. One never had to write a proposal to the government. It was the last thing on their mind, to ever take a dime from the government because, of course, the auto companies suspected the government. We were provided with outstanding equipment, plenty of money, and essentially you just had to tell your supervisor or your department manager a few months ahead of time how many more hundred thousand dollars you needed next year. [Laughter] And at least write it up as an internal proposal for a few pages, and make a list of equipment."

Goldman's team developed a prototype sodium sulfide battery, with the intention of using it to power cars. Mr. Ford had intentions of seeing the battery power everyday, freeway-capable Ford vehicles by 1976. But while these batteries were certainly powerful enough, both the sodium and sulfur anodes had to be kept molten - literally at 370 degrees Fahrenheit - in order for the vehicle to stay mobile. And something had to warm up those anodes and keep them warm, even in cold weather, in order for the engine to start - perhaps a gas-powered heater.

It was a dead end, and Goldman knew it. He left Ford in 1968, after projections of a five-digit price tag (in 1968 dollars) for Ford electric vehicles made it seem he had hitched his ride to a lead balloon. He would be hired by a company in Palo Alto that needed an expert in magnetic resonance, who would appear to be continuing the development work of its current chief scientist, whom executives were busy baiting for retirement - Chester Carlson, the creator of the world-changing Xerox 914 copier. But Xerox' CEO had a secret plan, which Goldman himself may not have known until after he was hired. Within weeks of his relocation, Xerox acquired a computer company called Scientific Data Systems. It was a research firm, and Goldman was to lead it.

"As good as he was at recruiting people to come to Dearborn and Detroit, he could do even better if he had a lab on the West Coast, preferably near Palo Alto or in the Bay Area somewhere," remarked Cole. "Well, when he went to Xerox, I think that was probably a quid pro quo for him accepting the job, that he got to set up a laboratory on the West Coast."

The Palo Alto Research Center, as most of us in the industry now know, essentially created the concept of the personal computer as we understand it today. Xerox never completely monetized that concept for itself, except in one critical respect: It advanced the notion of information as a product, specifically in order to establish a kind of platform for connecting computers to digital printers - an idea that not all Xerox executives signed onto. The physical manifestation of that platform was Ethernet, which to this day forms the crux of the fastest interconnection systems produced. And it helped establish Xerox as "The Document Company," introducing the metaphor of documents as manifestations of information rather than pieces of paper, enabling the desktop metaphor which today is more the center of workers' lives than their physical desktops.

In 1997, upon accepting a post as a board member for another IT company (one of several he simultaneously held), Goldman said, "The Internet has yet to define the proper milieu for commercialization." The lesson Goldman learned from Xerox was that information is the product, not the devices that produce it or the wires that carry it. In that sense, he helped create the most defining component of the Internet itself, at the tail end of an unpredictable chain of events that began with the surrender of Japan.

The other is that artificial intelligence (AI) is implied by any process which, when done well and correctly, appears to have required human intelligence. In other words, like legislative gridlock, you don't have to see it yourself to know it exists.

The brilliance of that notion is that it implies the value of faith. This is an amazing conviction, especially coming from a self-declared atheist. I hope the professor, whose passing we note with remembrance today, would not object to this self-declared Christian paying respect to his work and to reinforcing his faith.

"Intelligence" itself is a term whose definitions vary wildly, and which may apply to me only loosely. Personally, I define it as the use of a combination of available resources to achieve a desired and explicit objective. Artificial intelligence -- the concept which McCarthy pioneered -- requires only logic. By the professor's reasoning, the achievement of the objective should appear to require more than logic, which to me has always implied the belief in influences beyond the obvious.

For a Dartmouth College summer research project in 1955, then-Dartmouth professor McCarthy suggested students divide into groups to study the problem of how a computer could be programmed to simulate tasks reserved for humans, and whether language could be employed as a tool for enabling "self-improvement" in the machine. Together with giants of information theory such as Claude Shannon and Marvin Minsky, McCarthy threw out a handful of ideas he conceded were incomplete on their face, and in gathering students' interest in studying them, created what might today be described as an open source project.

"If a machine can do a job, then an automatic calculator can be programmed to simulate the machine," read McCarthy's 1955 proposal. "The speeds and memory capacities of present computers may be insufficient to simulate many of the higher functions of the human brain, but the major obstacle is not lack of machine capacity, but our inability to write programs taking full advantage of what we have... It may be speculated that a large part of human thought consists of manipulating words according to rules of reasoning and rules of conjecture. From this point of view, forming a generalization consists of admitting a new word and some rules whereby sentences containing it imply and are implied by others. This idea has never been very precisely formulated nor have examples been worked out."

A little while later, McCarthy tossed out this zinger: "Probably a truly intelligent machine will carry out activities which may best be described as self-improvement." The inherent oxymoronic quality of the phrase "truly intelligent machine" may be lost on the audience of 2011; in 1955, it had the weight of "truly omnipotent battery."

The question for the age, and the one that transformed McCarthy from a mathematics professor into a philosopher in the public mind, was whether a machine, or robot, or android (the format keeps changing) must have intelligence in order to exhibit something that resembles it enough to qualify as virtually human. What we learned from the experiment over the past six decades is that we can answer yes or no to this question, and change our minds any number of times, and yet still experience the thrill of participating in the search for the answer. And what we, as scientists at heart if not by trade, have learned through observation is that it would take the most brilliant human programmer alive to enable a machine to simulate the same stupid things that certain elements of humankind have done over this same period.

As a philosopher and, as some labeled him, a humanist, Prof. John McCarthy demonstrated an unusual degree of faith in something -- perhaps not God, or a god per se, but in something greater. "I don't claim to have a proof that God cannot exist," he wrote in 1997, for the forerunner of what would later be called a "blog." "It's just that I consider the state of the evidence on the God question to be similar to that on the werewolf question."

And yet he believed in something he called "progress." "Humanity has progressed over hundreds of thousands of years, but until about the seventeenth century, progress was a rare event," he wrote for his personal Web site. "There were novelties, but a person would not expect a whole sequence of improvements in his lifetime. Since then scientific progress has been continual, and in the advanced parts of the world, there has also been continued technological progress. Therefore, people no longer expect the world to remain the same as it is." His argument for the possibility that humanity could continue to exist for billions of years into the future, was more intuitive than scientific: He failed to see any reliable evidence why it wouldn't.

A sensible conclusion in the absence of facts to the contrary. Some would call this "intelligence." My take on this question is similar to my take on the God question. I would call it "faith."

Often known as "dmr," Ritchie was born in Bronxville, NY in 1941. He studied at Harvard University, initially focusing on physics. Ritchie said that he entered computing because "my undergraduate experience convinced me that I was not smart enough to be a physicist, and that computers were quite neat."

Ritchie joined Bell Labs in 1967 and worked with a group of developers, including Ken Thompson, to create UNIX, the first version of which was released in 1969. Initially called UNICS (following a system called MULTICS) was written in a low-level assembly language by Thompson. According to Thompson, Ritchie's contribution to UNIX was "mostly on the language and the I/O system."

The Creation of C

The language, of course, was C. So named because it followed the B (for Bell Labs) programming language, C is a higher-level language designed to allow cross-platform programming. To make it portable to different hardware, it was re-written in C, and released in 1971 as UNIX.

Brian Kerninghan said that with C "Dennis managed to find a perfect balance between expressiveness and efficiency. It was just right for creating systems programs like compilers, editors, and even operating systems. C made it possible for a programmer to get close to the machine for efficiency but remain far enough away to avoid being tied to a specific machine... As a result, C became in effect a universal assembler: close enough to the machine to be cost effective, but far enough away that a C program could be compiled for and run well on any machine."

The concept of a multi-platform language and operating system no doubt seem, well, unexceptional today. However, at the time, it was unheard of, as Herb Sutter notes.

"Before C, there was far more hardware diversity than we see in the industry today. Computers proudly sported not just deliciously different and offbeat instruction sets, but varied wildly in almost everything, right down to even things as fundamental as character bit widths... There was no such thing as a general-purpose program that was both portable across a variety of hardware and also efficient enough to compete with custom code written for just that hardware."

Tim Bray writes, "Unix combines more obvious-in-retrospect engineering design choices than anything else I've seen or am likely to see in my lifetime... It is impossible – absolutely impossible – to overstate the debt my profession owes to Dennis Ritchie. I've been living in a world he helped invent for over thirty years."

The combination of C and UNIX have been at the core of computing ever since, and are (in slightly altered form) still going strong today. UNIX, as a portable and multi-user operating system, became extremely popular. AT&T was prohibited from entering the computer market at the time UNIX was created, so it was freely spread far and wide to businesses, schools, and within the U.S. government.

UNIX ultimately spawned dozens of versions, including SunOS and Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, NeXTSTEP, BSD, A/UX, Mac OS X and many others. UNIX inspired the GNU Project and Linux, though they are not derived from the same codebase.

C is still widely used, as are its direct descendants; C++, Perl, Objective-C, Java, C#, PHP and many others.

K&R

The popularity of C has been helped by The C Programming Language, often referred to as K&R for its co-authors: Kerninghan and Ritchie.

The book was published in 1978, and is a comprehensive guide to C in less than 300 pages. Kerninghan said that he "twisted Dennis's arm into writing it" which was "probably the smartest thing I ever did." Kerninghan called Ritchie "an exceptionally clear and elegant writer."

K&R continues to be considered an important guide to C. It was revised in 1988 to accommodate the ANSI C standard, and has been translated into more than 20 languages. Kerninghan said that the book has been successful "in large part because of the success of C, though it probably helped that the book, like the language, is rather small and simple, and made it possible for people to do useful things quickly."

The book made popular the now-obligatory "Hello World!" example, which explains how to create a small program that prints "Hello World!" to the display.

Later Career

Later in his career, Ritchie continued in computer research and contributed to the creation of Plan 9 and Inferno distributed operating systems.

While neither Plan 9 or Inferno have achieved widespread popularity, Inferno has been released as open source and is under continued development.

Ritchie retired as the head of Lucent Technologies System Software Research Department in 2007. He received numerous awards for his achievements, including the U.S. National Medal of Technology in 1999 in conjunction with Thompson.

Rob Pike, who worked with Ritchie at Bell Labs and on the Plan 9 and Inferno projects, reported Ritchie's passing yesterday, saying, "He was a quiet and mostly private man, but he was also my friend, colleague, and collaborator, and the world has lost a truly great mind."

Where does Jobs stand in the pantheon of great American innovators? Certainly, he was one of the most inspiring and creative Americans of the modern era. Let's take a look at the history innovation in the United States and assess how these great people influenced how we live our lives today.

Benjamin Franklin (1706 - 1790)

"As we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously."

Eli Whitney (1765 - 1825)

"One of my primary objects is to form the tools so the tools themselves shall fashion the work and give to every part its just proportion."

Alexander Graham Bell (1847 - 1922)

"When one door closes another door opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us."

Thomas Edison (1847 - 1931)

"The first requisite for success is to develop the ability to focus and apply your mental and physical energies to the problem at hand - without growing weary. Because such thinking is often difficult, there seems to be no limit to which some people will go to avoid the effort and labor that is associated with it."

Nikola Tesla (1856 - 1943)

"The practical success of an idea, irrespective of its inherent merit, is dependent on the attitude of the contemporaries. If timely it is quickly adopted; if not, it is apt to fare like a sprout lured out of the ground by warm sunshine, only to be injured and retarded in its growth by the succeeding frost."

Fred Smith (1944 -- )

"The information about the package is just as important as the package itself."

Bill Gates (1955 -- )

"Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one."

Steve Jobs (1955 - 2011)

"The most compelling reason for most people to buy a computer for the home will be to link it into a nationwide communications network. We're just in the beginning stages of what will be a truly remarkable breakthrough for most people--as remarkable as the telephone." (PlayBoy interview, 1985)

Larry Page & Sergey Brin (1973 -- )

"The ultimate search engine would basically understand everything in the world, and it would always give you the right thing. And we're a long, long ways from that." ~Page

Mark Zuckerberg (1984 -- )

"When you give everyone a voice and give people power, the system usually ends up in a really good place. So, what we view our role as, is giving people that power."

This list, like any list of great people, is incomplete. Who was your favorite American innovator? Other great innovators, like Linus Torvalds (Linux) were cut from this list because they were not American. In the history of the world, who was the most influential innovator? Let us know in the comments.

While working as an engineer for Fairchild Semiconductor in the mid-1970s, Lawson created the Fairchild Channel F video game console. That was the type that took a different software cartridge for each game.

The Reviews of Electronics credits Lawson with providing the platform that launched the independent video game developer.

Born in Brooklyn and raised in Queens, he moved out to California to join the new company Fairchild Semiconductor where he served as Chief Hardware Engineer[4] and director of engineering and marketing. As the Village Voice notes, he was a member of the legendary Homebrew Computer Club. Other members included Apple's Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.

After Atari had taken the video gaming market, Lawson launched Videosoft, to develop games for it. In the early 1970s, Lawson had created the second ever arcade game (after Pong), Demolition Derby

He had in his later years suffered with diabetes and used a wheelchair, though he continued an active life building controls for lasers and telescopes. Last month he was, finally, honored by the International Game Developers Association.

Vintage Computing and Games has a wonderful interview with the man conducted in 2009.

He is survived by his wife, whom he married in 1965, his brother, Michael, of Queens, New York, and his daughter Karen and son Marc, both of Smyrna, Georgia.

Other sources: Wikipedia

While working at the RAND Corporation in the early Sixties, Baran outlined a method for dissembling information into "message blocks" in order to move them through a network, reassembling them at the end point. This method has come to be known as "packet switching."

The term "packet switching" was coined by Donald Davies, a UK researcher also working on the same process.

To understand the development of package switching as Baran outlined it, it is important to remember that its creation took place at the height of the Cold War between the U.S. and its allies and the Soviet Union and its allies. The innovation was security-based. By separating a message into parts, sending the parts by redundant routes, and only putting them back into coherent form at the end, it would make them much less likely to be intercepted. It would also ensure delivery even if individual nodes in the network were compromised or destroyed.

He outlined his full proposal in what the Computer History Museum described as "a 13-volume set of reports defining in detail an all digital nationally distributed network for digital voice and data."

Baran was born in Poland, emigrated to the U.S. and took a degree in electrical engineering at Drexel University in Philadelphia. Baran worked on the Univac at the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Company and for Hughes Aircraft in Los Angeles while earning a Masters in Engineering at UCLA. At that point he joined RAND.

It wasn't until 1969 that anyone actually built a network like the one Baran described. That was the U.S. Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, or Arpanet. The ARPANET was eventually replaced by the National Science Foundation Network, which grew into what we now know as the Internet.

Baran was preceded in death by his wife Evelyn, who passed away in 2007, and is survived by his son, David, three grandchildren and his companion Ruth Rothman.

*That was Al Gore, of course

Photo of Baran from the Computer History Museum | map from the ARPANET Completion Report | other sources: RAND, About

She was one of the female mathematicians, known as "computers," recruited by the United States military during World War II to test ballistics. They soon moved into the electronics program.

Jean, left

Jennings Bartik was born in December of 1924 and was raised on a farm near Stanberry in Missouri. After high school, she attended Northwest Missouri State Teachers College, now Northwest Missouri State University where she was the only female Math major at the time and which now has a computer museum named in her honor. She graduated in 1945.

ENIAC began in July of 1943, in secret, at the University of Pennsylvania's engineering school under the code name Project PX. Jennings Bartik was brought into the ENIAC project in the fall of 1945. The computer came on line in February of 1946, having cost $6 million in today's currency. It weighed 27 tons and contained almost 18,000 vacuum tubes.

Jennings Bartik later went on to program the BINAC and UNIVAC,

Here's the thing. The reason you can read this on your playing card-sized handheld goes straight back to ENIAC and women like Betty Jean Jennings Bartik. Your grandma invented the computer. Deal with it.

Hrmmm. Says here women are not as good as men at mathematics. Well, there's a head-scratcher for you.

Bartik photo from Computer History Museum | ENIAC photo Wikimedia Commons | other sources: TechEye | Northwest Missouri State University