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

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

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