Radia Joy Perlman (; born December 18, 1951) is an American computer programmer and network engineer. She is a major figure in assembling the networks and technology to enable what we now know as the internet. She is most famous for her invention of the spanning-tree protocol (STP), which is fundamental to the operation of network bridges, while working for Digital Equipment Corporation, thus earning her nickname "Mother of the Internet". Her innovations have made a huge impact on how networks self-organize and move data. She also made large contributions to many other areas of network design and standardization: for example, enabling today's link-state routing protocols, to be more robust, scalable, and easy to manage. Perlman was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2015 for contributions to Internet routing and bridging protocols. She currently holds over 100 issued patents and many prestigious awards in the field of computer science such as Lifetime Achievement awards and the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Data Communication.More recently she has invented the TRILL protocol to correct some of the shortcomings of spanning trees, allowing Ethernet to use optimal use of bandwidth. She is currently employed by Dell …
Radia Perlman
Author details
- Born:
- Dec. 18, 1951
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Radia Joy Perlman (; born December 18, 1951) is an American computer programmer and network engineer. She is a major figure in assembling the networks and technology to enable what we now know as the internet. She is most famous for her invention of the spanning-tree protocol (STP), which is fundamental to the operation of network bridges, while working for Digital Equipment Corporation, thus earning her nickname "Mother of the Internet". Her innovations have made a huge impact on how networks self-organize and move data. She also made large contributions to many other areas of network design and standardization: for example, enabling today's link-state routing protocols, to be more robust, scalable, and easy to manage. Perlman was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2015 for contributions to Internet routing and bridging protocols. She currently holds over 100 issued patents and many prestigious awards in the field of computer science such as Lifetime Achievement awards and the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Data Communication.More recently she has invented the TRILL protocol to correct some of the shortcomings of spanning trees, allowing Ethernet to use optimal use of bandwidth. She is currently employed by Dell EMC.
