PAUL BARAN, ONE OF THE CREATORS OF THE ARPANET, DIED SATURDAY

Baran helped create the “technical underpinnings” for the Arpanet, which was the government-sponsored precursor to the Internet. Baran worked at the RAND Corporation and outlined the fundamentals for packaging data into what he called “message blocks,” or discrete bundles. These bundles were then sent on different paths around a network and reassembled at their destination, much like the idea behind Willy Wonka’s “Television Chocolate” room where you could beam a whole piece of chocolate from one end of the room in particles to the other end of the room to become a whole chocolate bar. In the tech industry though, this is known as “packet-switching.”

According to the NYT, Baran wanted to build a “distributed communications network,” which was less open to attack than conventional networks. He thought that networks should be designed with “redundant routes” so that if one path failed or was destroyed, messages could still be delivered through a similar path.

This sounded like a crazy idea, and in fact, AT&T insisted it wouldn’t work when Baran approached the company with the idea in the mid-1960s. In 1969, the Defense Departments’s Advanced Research Projects Agency built the Arpanet, which included Baran’s ideas. Packet switching is still a main part of the Internet’s internal workings.

Though Baran is often called the founding father of the Internet, he said in a 2001 interview that the “Internet is really the work of a thousand people.”

Sadly, Baran died on Saturday from complications of lung cancer.