Baran, who received a 2005 Computer History Museum Fellow Award for his foundational work on packet switching, is joined on stage by Henry Lowood, Curator for History of Science and Technology Collections, Stanford University Libraries.

Baran discusses the origin and development of his accomplishments — which span a lifetime of entrepreneurial activity, including 150 papers, 40 patents, and five start-up companies—and how these continue to have an impact on our everyday lives.


Jim Gray is a "Distinguished Engineer" in Microsoft's Scaleable Servers Research Group and manager of Microsoft's Bay Area Research Center (BARC). His work focuses on databases and transaction processing. Jim is active in the research community, is an ACM, NAE, NAS, and AAAS Fellow, and received the ACM Turing Award for his work on transaction processing.

ABSTRACT: Distributed Computing Economics considers the relative costs of computing resources and the implications this has for distributed system design.


Van Jacobson is a Research Fellow at PARC. Prior to that he was Chief Scientist and co-founder of Packet Design. Prior to that he was Chief Scientist at Cisco. Prior to that he was head of the Network Research group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He's been studying networking since 1969.

ABSTRACT: Today's research community congratulates itself for the success of the internet and passionately argues whether circuits or datagrams are the One True Way. Meanwhile the list of unsolved problems grows.



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