Systems ApproachMar 9
Following on the news of Dave Farber's passing at the age of 91, this week our newsletter describes some of the ways he influenced us personally at Systems Approach, including setting up the collaboration in which Bruce and Larry first met.
https://systemsapproach.org/2026/03/09/dave-farber-and-gigabit-networks/
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Dave Farber is sometimes called "the Grandfather of the Internet", having mentored some of its most influential people (notably Jon Postel and Paul Mockapetris). He also advised Dave Sincoskie who led some pioneering packet switching research at Bellcore (and was Bruce's boss). 2/n
Mar 9 at 9:54pmWeb
Show threadSystems ApproachMar 9
Dave Farber was also something of a "superconnector", underpinning the 6 degrees of separation effect. If you knew Dave, you were 2 degrees from a lot of influential people. He spotted the chance to build a collaborative research network linking MIT, UPenn and Bellcore, based on the "sunshine switch" being developed in Sincoskie's group, and he brought in David Clark and Dave Tennenhouse from MIT. With all thesse Daves, we decided to call the project "DAWN"—a nod to "sunshine" but also short for "Daves' All Wonderful Network." 3/n
Show threadSystems ApproachMar 9
The catch with Dawn was that we couldn't find a way to finance high speed links between MIT, UPenn and Bellcore (about 500km). Miraculously, Farber made the connection to Bob Kahn (co-inventor of IP); they started up a Gigabit networking initiative, and somehow they persuaded the telco's to provide OC-48 SONET equipment (some of the first of its kind to be deployed) at no cost. So we just had to figure out how to increase the speed of our network by about 4x to play in the Gigabit initiative. For reference, 10Mbps Ethernet was state of the art at the time and a 1.5Mbps WAN link was considered high speed. Gigabits were definitely going to stress our designs. 4/n
Show threadSystems ApproachMar 9

The Gigabit testbed initiatives were spread around the country. Ours was known as Aurora after we added IBM to our initial set of collaborators. It was through Aurora that Bruce and Larry were introduced and starting working together on Gigabit NICs and the host software to support them. And from there we moved on to writing books, and here we are 35 years later, still going.

https://doi.org/10.1145/190314.190315

https://systemsapproach.org/books/
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Show threadSystems ApproachMar 9
More of our appreciation of Dave Farber can be found in this week's newsletter:
https://systemsapproach.org/2026/03/09/dave-farber-and-gigabit-networks/
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