From @joannechocolat
Radia Joy Perlman (born 1951) is an American computer programmer, network engineer, & major figure in assembling the networks and technology to enable what we now know as the Internet.
Personal note:
First of all, I love her name! "Radiating (happy, bright) Joy" - and all the photos of her I have seen seem to bear that out! 😊
Her best-known contribution is the Spanning Tree Protocol (#STP), which transformed Ethernet from a technology limited to a few hundred nodes confined w/i a single building into a technology that can create large networks with hundreds of thousands of computers, & made fundamental contributions to internet routing, making it more resilient, scalable & easy to manage. The protocols she designed in the 80s remain widely deployed today.
At the time, if a network had extra connections (called redundant links), it could create a "loop." A loop would cause data to circle around forever, flooding the network and causing it to fail.
Perlman came up with a brilliant solution in just a few days. She created STP, which allows networks to have backup paths for safety, but turns off any extra paths that could cause a loop. This leaves just one clear, active path for data to travel between any two points on the network.
Perlman even wrote a short #poem, called "Algorhyme," to explain how STP works: 🤩
(To be continued ...)
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#CelebratingWomen #Radia_Joy_Perlman #Computer_Science