Internet Grandfather, Larry Roberts, Died at 81

by CJ Nice of tech4today.net

Lawrence ''Larry'' Roberts,  died of a heart attack on December 26 at his home in Redwood City, California. He is known to be one of the grandfathers of the internet which is highly beneficial and crucial in today's world.

He was the manager of the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency in the late 1960's. That is why when we talk about his contribution in the internet it was opposed that more than technical it was just the managerial and administrative side.

However, in 1969 before Arpanet made its first host-to-host connection, Larry Roberts and J.C.R. Licklider gave a presentation to the National Security Agency (NSA) in Fort Meade, Maryland. A presentation which is in regards to ''What networks would look 10 years into the future'' which is highly relevant to the timely development of internet.

“Although they knew in the back of their mind that it was a good idea and were supportive on a philosophical front, from a practical point of view, they—Minsk and McCarthy [two prominent computer scientists], and everybody with their own machine-wanted [to continue having] their own machine,” Roberts said in a 1989 interview published at the Computer History Museum’s website.

“It was only a couple of years after they had gotten on [the ARPANET] that they started raving about how they could now share research, and jointly publish papers, and do other things that they could never do before.”

The New York Times obituary on Roberts explains what he did after he left ARPA to go work in the private sector:

Dr. Roberts left ARPA in 1973 to become the founding chief executive of Telenet, a networking company that used packet switching. Seven years later, Dr. Roberts and his co-founders sold Telenet to GTE for $60 million.

The start-ups that followed focused on flow control algorithms for internet traffic and did not achieve the same level of success. He ultimately failed to amass significant wealth from the internet.

“It’s like you created the Spider-Man character and it turned into a giant franchise, but you only got paid by the hour for drawing it,” said [Larry’s son] Pasha Roberts.

Yet Dr. Roberts remained philosophical about this aspect of his life. “It’s sad that it didn’t benefit me,” he said in the 2018 interview. “But it’s interesting, and I love the knowledge I gained from building it and using it and understanding it from the beginning.”

You can search in the internet and watch Computer Networks—The Heralds of Resource Sharing a documentary of Larry Roberts talking about history and future networked computing.

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