January 27, 2025

Evania Ernest

11th Grade

Williamsville East High School

In 1985, Digital Equipment Corporation had a problem. In computer networks, there were many paths for data to travel along. However, if these networks had loops, the data couldn’t reliably or efficiently make its way from one computer to another due to the data circling the network. The only solution was to prevent these loops from occurring in the first place. This was a difficult, almost impossible, task. Nonetheless, when Radia Perlman’s manager gave her the problem, she found a solution almost immediately, thereby changing the Internet forever and earning herself the moniker “Mother of the Internet”.

Perlman was born in 1952 in Portsmouth, Virginia, although she mainly spent her childhood in New Jersey. She attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she graduated with two degrees in mathematics. Perlman was one of fifty women in her freshman class of one thousand, and she often recounts how startled she would be to see other women on the campus. 

Her first job was at Bolt, Beranek, Newman (BBN), a groundbreaking tech company that helped develop the ARPANet, an early predecessor to the modern-day Internet. Perlman discovered a love of network protocols at BBN, describing them as “a beautiful symphony” as opposed to the linear nature of software programs she had started on. 

Perlman soon impressed a manager from Digital Equipment Corp. while presenting on network routing, and she joined the firm in 1980. This is where her manager presented her with the seemingly impossible task of creating a “magic box” that would sit between two Ethernets. The main goal was to prevent loops in the network. 

The same night her manager gave her the assignment, Perlman came up with a simple yet effective solution: the Spanning Tree Protocol. The Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) organizes networks in a way that removes loops by creating a “tree” structure. This enables networks to deliver data reliably, provides automatic backup if links fail, and essentially sets up the basic system the Internet relies on today. 

Perlman continued to learn and make groundbreaking discoveries, earning her PhD in computer science from MIT and over 100 patents.

Perlman also co-wrote two textbooks and served as a professor at Harvard University and the University of Washington, enabling others to learn about her passion. She also earned numerous awards over her career, including the Lifetime Achievement award from Usenix.

Perlman’s contributions to the modern Internet are hard to overstate. Her groundbreaking work solved problems that enabled modern-day networks to be manageable and efficient, and her passion will remain inspiring for generations to come.