Lawrence Gilman Roberts was the program manager at the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) who took the abstract idea of packet switching and turned it into a concrete, funded, and built network. According to his Internet Hall of Fame profile, in 1967 Roberts “became the Chief Scientist of ARPA taking on the task of designing, funding, and managing the radically new communications network concept of packet switching,” and he “designed and managed the first packet network, the ARPANET (the precursor to the Internet).”
That same year Roberts published the first paper on the ARPANET’s design, “Multiple Computer Networks and Intercomputer Communication,” presented at the ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles at Gatlinburg, Tennessee. The paper laid out a plan for connecting geographically distributed computers, including the use of dedicated communications processors and shared links between machines. It was at this same gathering that Roberts encountered the work of Donald Davies’s group at the British National Physical Laboratory, presented by Roger Scantlebury, and he adopted both their term “packet switching” and key elements of their design, while also drawing on Paul Baran’s earlier RAND reports.
Roberts then drove the ARPANET from plan to reality. He oversaw the request for proposals that led Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN) to build the Interface Message Processors, the specialized minicomputers that handled packet routing between host machines, and he managed the program as the first nodes were installed at UCLA, SRI, UC Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah in 1969.
Roberts later wrote that the computer networks built in the 1970s resembled Davies’s original 1965 design “in nearly all respects,” a candid acknowledgment of the shared origins of the work. For his role he was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame as a Pioneer in 2012 and shared honors such as the Charles Stark Draper Prize with Cerf, Kahn, and Kleinrock. Among the small group credited as fathers of the Internet, Roberts is the one who served as the ARPANET’s chief architect and manager.