Author: Katie Hafner / Source: New York Times
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.The cause was complications of melanoma, his son Bennet said.
In 1969, Mr. Heart led a small team of talented young engineers to build the Interface Message Processor, or I.M.P., a computer whose special function was to switch data among the computers on the Arpanet. 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.
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.
Mr. Heart demanded that I.M.P.s be made impenetrable, believing that curious graduate students would be tempted to poke around the machines to see how they worked and bring down the network with their tinkering.
“I took an extraordinarily rigid position,” Mr. Heart said in an interview in 1994. “They were not to touch it, they weren’t to go near it, they were to barely look at it.
It was a closed box with no switches available.”As a result, the I.M.P. was encased in intimidating battleship-gray steel.
“It was part of Frank’s personality to try to control uncontrollable events,” said David Walden, a computer programmer who helped build software for the I.M.P.s.
Thanks to Mr. Heart’s s relentless worry about errors, his team of 10 engineers, who called themselves the I.M.P. Guys, ended up inventing the field of remote diagnostics for computers. They also designed the I.M.P.s to run unattended as much as possible, bestowing on them the ability to restart by themselves after a power failure or crash.
This infant network “did a lot of looking at its navel all the time,” Mr. Heart said in 1994, “sending back little messages telling us how it was feeling and telling us what kind of things were happening, where.”
Bolt, Beranek and Newman, the Cambridge, Mass.-based technology company where Mr. Heart spent most of his career, beat I.B.M. and other larger firms in the…
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