April 17, 1934 — David Farber, the Grandfather of the Internet, Was Born

As I often say, this is someone who has influenced your life far more than Taylor Swift or Sydney Sweeney, yet very few people know his name.

David J. Farber was not the leading expert or the sole inventor of any particular technology. To understand his contribution to the development of computers and the Internet, you have to look a little deeper.

First steps in computer networking

In the 1960s and 1970s, Farber worked in university laboratories where early experiments with computer networks were taking place. This was the era of ARPANET — a research network funded by the ARPA agency of the U.S. Department of Defense. Researchers were trying to understand how to connect different kinds of computers and how to build distributed systems where computation could run across multiple machines.

The Distributed Computing System project

In the late 1970s at the University of Delaware, Farber and his colleagues developed the Distributed Computing System (DCS). It was a network of several computers connected to work together and share data. The architecture allowed users to run tasks on different machines and share resources across laboratories. Experiments like this were an important step toward the network infrastructure that later became standard in universities.

Contributing to the Internet community

Farber actively participated in networking research programs and supported the growth of academic networks. He was involved in projects such as CSNET — a network that allowed universities to connect to the early Internet even without direct access to ARPANET. Initiatives like this helped spread the idea of open networks beyond military laboratories.

The “Grandfather of the Internet”

Farber earned this nickname because he became a mentor to many of the “fathers of the Internet.” According to various sources, his students and collaborators included:

• Eric Allman — creator of Sendmail, the email server that dominated the 1980s and 1990s
• Steve Crocker — author of RFC 1 and many other RFCs, one of the most important figures in the history of the Internet
• David D. Clark — one of the architects of the early Internet
• Jon Postel — one of the contributors to TCP, IP, and DNS
• David P. Reed — contributor to TCP, IP, and UDP

The Interesting People mailing list

In the 1990s, Farber created the Interesting People (IP) mailing list. It was an email discussion forum for engineers, researchers, and people from the technology industry. Before social media, mailing lists like this were centers of the Internet’s intellectual life. Interesting People quickly became a kind of club where people discussed technology, Internet policy, the future of the digital society, and the crypto wars. In the 1990s — just as today — such discussions were extremely important to ensure that technology developed in ways that benefited society.

Over time, Farber became actively involved in debates about Internet regulation. He consistently argued for an open network, freedom of information exchange, and a cautious approach to government control over digital infrastructure. His comments often appeared in public discussions about digital rights and the future of the Internet.