DAVID J. FARBER (1934-2026)

David J. Farber, a gregarious professor of computer networks who was sometimes called the “grandfather of the internet” because of the ultimately groundbreaking students he trained, died on Feb. 7 in Tokyo. He was 91.

When Professor Farber started his career in the mid-1950s, at Bell Laboratories, computers were practically islands unto themselves. If they communicated at all, they talked by means of a Teletype or punch card reader down the hall.

Since then, thanks in part to his work, the realms of communication and computation merged into that one powerful glue for society that is the internet; The New York Times once described him as “an early architect” of it.

Dr. Postel’s 1974 dissertation, “A Graph-Model Analysis of Computer Communications Protocols,” would define much of the evolution of the early internet. Another Farber student from that era, Paul Mockapetris, would help design the Domain Name System (DNS), the address directory of the internet.

Those algorithms, along with others developed with other students and colleagues throughout the research community, became part of the foundation for a variety of academic experimental networks that would eventually be called simply the internet. If Professor Farber was not supervising the work directly, he was often on committees that lobbied the federal government for support.

Perhaps his most influential paper was one he wrote with the engineer Paul Baran in 1977, “The Convergence of Computing and Telecommunications Systems.” In it, they argued that digital computers were now fast enough to take over communication functions, later to take the form of email, text messaging and more. The computers were not just for rapidly adding up columns of numbers, they said, but also, as creative tools, for supporting a wide range of human interaction.

That insight helped attract investment money from the National Science Foundation to expand the Arpanet, a precursor to the internet funded by the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency. Professor Farber helped organize a project that linked hundreds of universities and research labs with the evolving Internet Protocols.

“I don’t think anyone in the early days thought there was going to be a commercial application for what they were building.” Professor Farber recalled to the website Hightechforum.org. “It’s a research project.”

To read the complete article, see:
David J. Farber, ‘Grandfather of the Internet,’ Dies at 91 (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/14/technology/david-farber-dead.html)

For more, see:
David J. Farber, Known as the ‘Grandfather of the Internet,’ Dies at 91 (https://www.wsj.com/tech/david-j-farber-dies-at-91-99a23aca)
In Memoriam: David J. Farber, ‘Grandfather of the Internet’ (https://ics.uci.edu/2026/03/02/in-memoriam-david-j-farber-grandfather-of-the-internet/)

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