Tech Women: Meet Radia Perlman, A Key Link In Shaping Internet

Internet has become an indispensable part of our lives. It is difficult to imagine our lives without it. But its gigantic spread dates back to the 1970s when a lot of scientists and programmers were slogging day and night to assemble the technology to shape the robust network of Internet we see today. One of the engineers who played an instrumental role in that process is American software designer Radia Perlman.

Research

During her academic stint at MIT, Perlman undertook a UROP (Undergraduate Research Opportunity) within the LOGO Lab at the (then) MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

“The world would be a better place if more engineers, like me, hated technology. The stuff I design, if I’m successful, nobody will ever notice. Things will just work, and be self-managing."

She developed a child-friendly version of the educational robotics language LOGO, called TORTIS ("Toddler's Own Recursive Turtle Interpreter System").

Interestingly, she taught young children how to program a LOGO educational robot called a Turtle. In fact, the youngest child to do this was just 3 ½ years old.

The doctoral thesis Perlman submitted at MIT during her Ph.D addressed the issue of routing in the presence of malicious network failures.

Career

• Perlman was working with an American company, Digital Equipment Corporation, where she invented Spanning Tree Protocol (STP), which is intrinsic to the operation of network bridges.
• She has also contributed to many other areas of network design and standardization such as link-state protocols, including TRILL. She invented this to rectify some loopholes of the shortcomings of spanning-trees.
• Perlman has also written a textbook on networking. Besides this, she is a co-author of another on network security. She holds more than 100 issued patents.

"Start out with finding the right problem to solve. This is a combination of 'what customers are asking for', 'what customers don’t even know they want yet' and 'what can be solved with something simple to understand and manage'” - on planning specification

It is funny to note the extent to which gender digital divide exists in the world even when there have been remarkable women in the past like Perlman doing stellar work in the advancement of technology.

Read Also: Tech Women: Meet Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer