Lawrence Roberts

School Director Andy Snow presented Dr. Lawrence Roberts the Strowger Award during the 2004 Communication Week program where Roberts gave the keynote speech entitled "The Past and Future of the Internet."

Dr. Lawrence Roberts led the team that designed and developed ARPANET, the world's first major computer packet network. While at MIT in 1965, he created the first computer-to-computer network using a packet link between MIT and SDC. Based on that success, he moved to ARPA in 1966 as ARPA's chief scientist, and began to architect ARPANET in 1967, including the theoretical packet switching work by Leonard Kleinrock to expand the network to many nodes.

Dr. Roberts designed and managed the building of the ARPANET over the next 6 years. The first four computers were connected in 1969 and 1973, 23 computers were connected worldwide. At that point, Dr. Roberts turned the development over to Bob Kahn and Vint Cert and left ARPA to form the first commercial packet network, Telenet.

Roberts and Kleinrock, along with Vinton Cert and Robert Kahn, are widely recognized as the four founding fathers of the Internet.

Dr. Roberts has received numerous awards for his work, including the Secretary of Defense Meritorious Service Medal, the Harry Goode Memorial Award from the American Federation of Information Processing, the IEEE Computer Pioneer Award, the Interface Conference Award, and, in 1982, the L.M. Ericsson prize for research in data communications. In 1992, the IEEE Computer Society awarded him the W. Wallace McDowell Award. In 1998 he received the ACM SIGCOMM communications award.

For additional information about Lawrence Roberts, go to http://www.ziplink.net/~lroberts/.