Lawrence G. Roberts
| Lawrence Gilman Roberts | |
|---|---|
| Born |
December 21, 1937 Connecticut, United States |
| Institutions | Lincoln Lab, ARPA, Telenet |
| Alma mater | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| Known for | founding father of the internet |
| Influences | J. C. R. Licklider, Ivan Sutherland |
| Notable awards |
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| Notes | |
Lawrence G. Roberts (born December 21, 1937 in Connecticut) is an American scientist who received the Draper Prize in 2001 and the Principe de Asturias Award in 2002 "for the development of the Internet"
As a program manager and office director at the Advanced Research Projects Agency, Roberts and his team created the ARPANET using packet switching techniques invented by British computer scientist Donald Davies. The ARPANET was a predecessor to the modern Internet.
Lawrence (Larry) Roberts grew up in Westport, Connecticut as the son of Elliott and Elizabeth Roberts, who both had earned their doctorates in chemistry. During his youth, he built a Tesla coil, assembled a television, and designed a telephone network built from transistors for his parent's Girl Scout camp.
Roberts attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he received his bachelor's degree (1959), master's degree (1960), and Ph.D. (1963), all in electrical engineering.
After receiving his PhD, Roberts continued to work at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory. Having read the seminal 1961 paper of the "Intergalactic Computer Network" by J. C. R. Licklider, Roberts developed the concept of a computer-to-computer network that could communicate via data packets. In 1966, he became program manager in the ARPA Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), which funded the development of the ARPANET. When Robert Taylor was sent to Vietnam in 1969 and then resigned, Roberts became director of the IPTO. The second node on the ARPANET was another important research project funded by Roberts: the Augmentation Research Center led by Douglas Engelbart.
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