Frank Heart, the engineer who oversaw development of the first routing computer for the Arpanet, the precursor to the internet, died on Sunday at a retirement community in Lexington, Mass. He was 89.
Mr. Heart's team built the gateway device for the Arpanet, the pre- cursor to the internet. Data networking was so new then, they made it up as they went.
Not to minimize Mr. Heart's contributions, but the article credits several improvements to him which were actually developed back in the 1950s.
" To this day, many of the principles Mr. Heart emphasized ? reliability, error resistance and the capacity for self-correction ? remain central to the internet?s robustness."
The Western Union Technical Review, on this newsgroup's archives, has numerous articles from the 1950s on data transmission reliability. The Bell System, IBM, and MIT, among others, also conducted considerable research on that subject in the 1950s.
Ref:
"Data networking was so new that Mr. Heart and his team had no choice but to invent technology as they went. For example, the Arpanet sent data over ordinary phone lines. Human ears tolerate low levels of extraneous noise on a phone line, but computers can get tripped up by the smallest hiss or pop, producing transmission errors. Mr. Heart and his team devised a way for the I.M.P.s (pronounced imps) to detect and correct errors as they occurred."
The Bell System, IBM, MIT, and others were experimenting with this back in the 1950s. For example:
IBM developed a transceiver to transmit data, which included an error detection and correction protocol.
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