20 Facts About Radia Perlman

Radia Joy Perlman is an American computer programmer and network engineer.

Radia Perlman is a major figure in assembling the networks and technology to enable what we now know as the Internet.

Radia Perlman is most famous for her invention of the Spanning Tree Protocol, which is fundamental to the operation of network bridges, while working for Digital Equipment Corporation, thus earning her nickname "Mother of the Internet".

Radia Perlman's innovations have made a huge impact on how networks self-organize and move data.

Radia Perlman was elected to the Internet Hall of Fame in 2014, and to the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2016.

Radia Perlman received lifetime achievement awards from USENIX in 2006 and from the Association for Computing Machinery's SIGCOMM in 2010.

Radia Perlman's father worked on radar and her mother was a mathematician by training who worked as a computer programmer.

Radia Perlman graduated from Ocean Township High School in 1969.

Radia Perlman has been described as a pioneer of teaching young children computer programming.

Radia Perlman later said that she was so used to the gender imbalance, that it became normal.

Radia Perlman is most famous for STP, which is fundamental to the operation of network bridges in many smaller networks.

Radia Perlman is the recipient of awards such as Lifetime Achievement awards from USENIX and the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Data Communication.

Radia Perlman utilized the fact that bridges had unique 48 bit MAC addresses, and devised a network protocol so that bridges within the LAN communicated with one another.

Radia Perlman said that the benefits of the protocol amount to the fact that "you don't have to worry about topology" when changing the way a LAN is connected.

Radia Perlman has criticized changes that were made in the course of the standardization of the protocol.

Radia Perlman was the principal designer of the DECnet IV and V protocols, and IS-IS, the OSI equivalent of OSPF.

Radia Perlman made major contributions to the Connectionless Network Protocol.

Radia Perlman has collaborated with Yakov Rekhter on developing network routing standards, such as the OSI Inter-Domain Routing Protocol, the OSI equivalent of BGP.

Radia Perlman subsequently worked as a network engineer for Sun Microsystems, now Oracle.

Radia Perlman specialized in network and security protocols and, while working for Oracle, obtained more than 50 patents.