#Radia perlman interconnections software#

She later said that she was so used to the gender imbalance, that it became normal. When the men’s dorms at MIT became coed Perlman moved out of the women’s dorm into a mixed dorm, where she became the 'resident female'. To begin with MIT only had one women’s dorm, limiting the number of women students that could study. When studying at MIT in the late 60s she was one among the 50 or so women students, in a class of about 1,000 students. She earned her PhD in computer science from MIT in 1988 her doctoral thesis on routing in environments where malicious network failures are present serves as the basis for much of the work that now exists in this area. There she first got involved with designing network protocols. Īs a math grad at MIT she needed to find an adviser for her thesis, and joined the MIT group at BBN Technologies. MIT media project later tracked her down and told her that she started a new field called tangible user interface from the leftovers of her abandoned project. This project was abandoned because 'being the only woman around, I wanted to be taken seriously as a 'scientist' and was a little embarrassed that my project involved cute little kids'. Afterwards, she was inspired to make a new programming language that would teach much younger children similar to Logo, but using special 'keyboards' and input devices. Perlman has been described as a pioneer of teaching young children computer programming. During research performed in 1974–76, young children-the youngest aged 3½ years, programmed a LOGO educational robot called a Turtle. Working under the supervision of Seymour Papert, she developed a child-friendly version of the educational robotics language LOGO, called TORTIS ('Toddler's Own Recursive Turtle Interpreter System').

#Radia perlman interconnections software#

She was given her first paid job in 1971 as part-time programmer for the LOGO Lab at the (then) MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, programming system software such as debuggers. Education Īs an undergraduate at MIT Perlman learned programming for a physics class. She graduated from Ocean Township High School in 1969. I assumed I'd either get electrocuted, or I'd break something'. It never occurred to me to take anything apart. She was the only woman in the class and later reflected 'I was not a hands-on type person.

But she didn't feel like she fit underneath the stereotype of an 'engineer' as she did not break apart computer parts ĭespite being the best science and math student in her school it was only when Perlman took a programming class in high school that she started to consider a career that involved computers. While her mother helped her with her math homework, they mainly talked about literature and music. She enjoyed playing the piano and French horn. During her school years Perlman found math and science to be “effortless and fascinating”, but had no problem achieving top grades in other subjects as well. Her father worked on radar and her mother was a mathematician by training who worked as a computer programmer. Both of her parents worked as engineers for the US government. Perlman was born in 1951, Portsmouth, Virginia. As of 2022, she was a Fellow at Dell Technologies. More recently she has invented the TRILL protocol to correct some of the shortcomings of spanning trees, allowing Ethernet to use optimal use of bandwidth. She received lifetime achievement awards from USENIX in 2006 and from the Association for Computing Machinery’s SIGCOMM in 2010. She was elected to the Internet Hall of Fame in 2014, and to the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2016. Perlman was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2015 for contributions to Internet routing and bridging protocols. She also made large contributions to many other areas of network design and standardization: for example, enabling today's link-state routing protocols, to be more robust, scalable, and easy to manage. Her innovations have made a huge impact on how networks self-organize and move data.

She is most famous for her invention of the spanning-tree protocol (STP), which is fundamental to the operation of network bridges, while working for Digital Equipment Corporation, thus earning her nickname 'Mother of the Internet'.

She is a major figure in assembling the networks and technology to enable what we now know as the internet. Radia Joy Perlman ( / ˈ r eɪ d i ə/ born December 18, 1951) is an American computer programmer and network engineer. Network layer protocols with Byzantine robustness (1988) Network and security protocols computer books