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Radia perlman interconnections1/3/2024 ![]() But there were still certain limitations. Her contribution and innovations made networks more robust, easier to manage, and more scalable. Perlman’s first major work after joining Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in the early 1980s was designing routing for DECnet, a protocol that is still widely deployed in the Internet today. ![]() It’s not a feature that users experience directly-like a cloud-based word processor or a hypertext browser-but without the resilience it creates, our experience of those more obvious features would be seriously impaired. The Spanning Tree Protocol that Perlman designed in the early 1980s is a marvelous case study in network protocol design. I’d have to remind myself that I was also that 'other gender.'" “I’d notice that it kind of looked weird…this other gender person looking curiously out of place in the crowd. In an interview with The Atlantic several years ago, Perlman recalled that women were so scarce on the MIT campus that she’d find herself startled when she encountered another woman in her classes. “When I learned to program a few years later, I realized it was fun and not difficult, but this experience made me understand the sense of panic that can cause someone perfectly capable of learning something to fail because they believe they cannot do it.” Shortly after that unpromising taste of programming at Stevens, Perlman enrolled as an undergrad at MIT, one of only 50 women in a freshman class of roughly a thousand. If someone had asked me what I was interested in doing, I would have said: Oh anything, as long as it's reasonably interesting-and as long as it doesn't involve computers,” she adds. I got nothing out of that class because I felt I was so many years behind, I’d never catch up. ![]() I had no idea what that meant, and so my mind shut down. “And then they were asking questions with fancy words, like input. I had no idea what a ham radio was,” she recalls. “Everyone was bragging about how they had built ham radios when they were seven. But if US Patent #7339900 is only part of the story of the network revolution-one of many patented breakthroughs that have long been neglected by the very people who benefit from them-it does stand out from the pack in one crucial respect: it is probably the only software patent on record that features a poem. Radia Perlman contributed more than her fair share of those pieces over her long career-and probably did as much as anyone to explain how stable networks worked, teaching a whole generation of network designers in her wake. That architecture was the product of many minds, each contributing small pieces to the puzzle that over time has given us the network stability that the entire world depends on. We tend to focus on the glittery applications that we interact with directly-TikTok and Chrome and Spotify-but all those apps would be worthless without the quiet miracle of stable network architecture, seamlessly connecting servers and routers all around the world. Her textbook Interconnections is a networking classic, and she’s the co-author of Network Security.Our understanding of networks-how to make them stable, self-correcting, efficient-is a remarkably young science, given how much the modern world now relies on the consistent flow of information across them. ![]() In fact, she holds more than 100 patents and improved STP through development of TRILL (TRansparent Interconnection of Lots of Links), which allows for improved bandwidth. Like any good tech pioneer, however, Perlman didn’t stop there. This “tree” of links became standard protocol and enabled the creation of massive networks. Only one link is every active, but there’s always a link available. Essentially, if one link fails, a backup is always available. A supervisor asked her to develop a means for computers to share data more reliably, so she created STP to provide redundancy between network points. Perlman developed STP in 1985 while working for Digital Equipment Corporation. Perlman was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2014 for her work. The algorithm, also known as the “Spanning Tree Protocol” or STP, was the brainchild of Radia Perlman. You may not have heard of the “Spanning Tree Algorithm,” but it’s the backbone of the Ethernet technology we enjoy and rely upon today. ![]()
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