Obituary: David J. Farber Earned Nickname 'Grandfather of the Internet'

David J. Farber, a pioneering computer scientist, engineer and former Carnegie Mellon University professor whose vision for and work on computer networking earned him the nickname "grandfather of the internet," died Feb. 7 at his home in Tokyo. He was 91 years old.

He had been on the faculty at Keio University in Tokyo since 2018.

"Dave is not a household name, but he impacted every household on the planet," said Nick Frollini, a faculty member in CMU's Software and Societal Systems Department (S3D). "He had this preternatural ability to understand everything that was going on in the space, and he never stopped ingesting information."

Known for his work on distributed computer systems, Farber's career stretched across eight decades and included stops in academia, industry and government. Though he is known for his work on networking computers, he was just as adept at bringing people together. He fostered dialogues between experts across disciplines, influenced tech policy and mentored students whose work provided the structure for the modern internet.

Farber was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, in 1934. After earning a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and a master's degree in mathematics from the Stevens Institute of Technology, Farber joined Bell Laboratories, where he helped develop the first electronic switching system and the SNOBOL programming language. That's also where he met mathematician Gloria Gioumousis, who he married in 1965.

Following stints at the RAND Corporation, Xerox Data Systems and Scientific Data Systems, he returned to academia, accepting a position at the University of California, Irvine, in 1969.

It was during his time at UC Irvine in the early 1970s, that Farber helped create the world's first operational distributed computer system. It remains a milestone in the advent of computer networking and a direct ancestor of the modern internet. Several of the students he advised there, including Jon Postel and David Mockapetris, went on to create the protocols that still govern the internet, earning them the "fathers of the internet" label and making Farber the network's grandfather.

After UC Irvine, Farber held academic posts at the University of Delaware and the University of Pennsylvania. He continued working on distributed systems through the 1980s, contributing to CSNet, NSFNet and NREN — smaller networks that made it easier for computer science researchers all over the world to communicate and advance their work. In the 1990s, he helped create the Gigabit Network Testbed Initiative, a government-funded research initiative that focused on developing and deploying high-speed internet connectivity.

Farber started and maintained a mailing list he called "The I.P. List," a curated feed of news on networking, computing and policy, where I.P. stood for "interesting people." At its peak, the list had more than 25,000 readers.

"He could invent mechanisms that could work for making things happen without relying on institutional mechanisms," said Mary Shaw, the Alan J. Perlis Professor of Computer Science in S3D. "It's just Dave doing his thing and people gravitating to it."

From 2000 to 2001, Farber served as the chief technologist for the Federal Communications Commission. He joined CMU in 2003 as a Distinguished Career Professor of Computer Science and Public Policy, with joint appointments in the School of Computer Science and Heinz College. In 2018, he left CMU to join the faculty at Keio University in Japan.

"After all he did, he could have retired, but he wanted to teach. He wanted to share," Frollini said. "He had such a blast in Japan, and I'm delighted that all those students got to learn from him, too."

Farber was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and the Association for Computing Machinery. He served on the board of directors of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the advisory board of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and as a trustee of the Internet Society. He was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2013.

Farber is survived by his son, Emanuel, and two grandchildren. He was predeceased by his wife, Gloria, who died in 2010; and a son, Joseph, who died in 2006.