Author: Katie Hafner / Source: New York Times
Lawrence Roberts, far left, with other internet pioneers, from left, Robert Kahn, Vinton Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee, at a conference in Spain in 2002. Dr. Roberts insisted that engineers look for practical uses for the Arpanet, the precursor to the internet.
Carlos Alvarez/Getty Images
In late 1966, a 29-year-old computer scientist drew a series of abstract figures on tracing paper and a quadrille pad. Some resembled a game of cat’s cradle; others looked like heavenly constellations; still others like dress patterns.
Those curious drawings were the earliest topological maps of what we now know as the internet. The doodler, Lawrence G. Roberts, died on Dec. 26 at his home in Redwood City, Calif. He was 81.
The cause was a heart attack, said his son Pasha.
As a manager at the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA, Dr. Roberts designed much of the Arpanet — the internet’s precursor — and oversaw its implementation in 1969.
Dr. Roberts called upon a circle of colleagues who shared his interest in computer networking for help in creating the technical underpinnings of the Arpanet, integrating and refining many ideas for how data should flow.
Dr. Roberts was considered the decisive force behind packet switching, the technology that breaks data into discrete bundles that are then sent along various paths around a network and reassembled at their destination. He decided to use packet switching as the underlying technology of the Arpanet; it remains central to the function of the internet.
And it was Dr. Roberts’s decision to build a network that distributed control of the network across multiple computers. Distributed networking remains another foundation of today’s internet.
Dr. Roberts’s interest in computer networking began when he was a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the early 1960s. He paid close attention to the work of his longtime colleague, Leonard Kleinrock, who had done research on theoretical aspects of computer networks, analyzing the problem of data flow. Dr. Roberts also followed the ideas of J.C.R. Licklider, a prominent psychologist and predecessor of Dr. Roberts’s at ARPA, who envisioned what he called an “intergalactic computer network.”
It was under Dr. Roberts’s leadership at ARPA that the possibilities of computer networking began to grow clear to a community beyond the core of scientists who built the Arpanet.
He long believed that a computer network was of little importance unless it was used in interesting ways. As early as 1968, he exhorted his colleagues to create applications for the nascent network. ARPA, for instance, was one of the largest early users of electronic mail.
“Larry led us to uncover potential that we never would have seen had he not pushed so hard for increased functionality,” said Vinton G. Cerf, Google’s chief internet evangelist and a graduate student in computer science at the University of California, Los Angeles when Dr. Roberts was overseeing the building of the Arpanet. “He pushed all of us to find ways in which we could make good on the promise of resource sharing.”
He was also a serial entrepreneur and corporate executive. After leaving ARPA in 1973, Dr. Roberts founded or co-founded a half-dozen companies focused on computer networking.
Lawrence Gilman Roberts was born on Dec. 21, 1937, in Westport, Conn., the youngest of three children. His parents, Elliott and Elizabeth, were both chemists who had met in the Yale University chemistry department while pursuing their doctorates.
As a young child, using his father’s chemistry books and chemicals, Dr. Roberts built a series of…
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