Radia Joy Perlman (; born December 18, 1951) is an American computer programmer and network engineer. She is a major figure in assembling the networks and technology to enable what we now know as the Internet. She is most famous for her invention of the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP), which is fundamental to the operation of network bridges, while working for Digital Equipment Corporation, thus earning her nickname "Mother of the Internet", a title that she did not like. Her innovations have made a huge impact on how networks self-organize and move data. She also made large contributions to many other areas of network design and standardization – for example, enabling today's link-state routing protocols to be more robust, scalable, and easy to manage. Perlman was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2019 for contributions to Internet routing and bridging protocols. She holds over 100 issued patents. She was elected to the Internet Hall of Fame in 2014, and to the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2016. She received lifetime achievement awards from USENIX in 2006 and from the Association for Computing Machinery’s SIGCOMM in 2010. More recently, she has invented the TRILL protocol to correct some of the shortcomings of spanning trees, allowing Ethernet to make optimal use of bandwidth. As of 2022, she was a Fellow at Dell Technologies.
Early life Perlman was born in 1951, Portsmouth, Virginia. She grew up in Loch Arbour, New Jersey. She is Jewish. Both of her parents worked as engineers for the US government. Her father worked on radar and her mother was a mathematician by training, who worked as a computer programmer. During her school years, Perlman found math and science to be “effortless and fascinating”, but had no problem achieving top grades in other subjects as well although she was a perfectionist. She enjoyed playing the piano and French horn. While her mother helped her with her math homework, they mainly talked about literature and music. But she did not feel as though she fit the stereotype of an "engineer", as she did not disassemble or reassemble computer components. Despite being the best science and math student in her school, it was only when Perlman took a programming class in high school that she started to consider a career that involved computers. She was the only woman in the class, and later reflected "I was not a hands-on type person. It never occurred to me to take anything apart. I assumed I'd either get electrocuted, or I'd break something". She graduated from Ocean Township High School in 1969.
Education As an undergraduate at MIT, Perlman learned programming for a physics class. She was given her first paid job in 1971 as part-time programmer for the LOGO Lab at the (then) MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, programming system software such as debuggers. Working under the supervision of Seymour Papert, she developed a child-friendly version of the educational robotics language LOGO, called TORTIS ("Toddler's Own Recursive Turtle Interpreter System"). During research performed in 1974-76, young children – the youngest aged 3½ years – programmed a LOGO educational robot called a Turtle. Perlman has been described as a pioneer of teaching young children computer programming. Afterwards, she was inspired to make a new programming language that would teach much younger children similar to Logo, but using special "keyboards" and input devices. This project was abandoned because "being the only woman around, I wanted to be taken seriously as a 'scientist' and was a little embarrassed that my project involved cute little kids". An MIT Media project later tracked her down, and told her that others had started a new field called tangible user interface from the leftovers of her abandoned project. As a math grad at MIT, she needed to find an adviser for her thesis, and joined the MIT group at BBN Technologies. There she first got involved with designing network protocols. Perlman obtained a SB and MS in Mathematics, and later a PhD in Computer Science from MIT in 1988. Her doctoral thesis on routing in environments where malicious network failures are present serves as the basis for much of the work that now exists in this area. When studying at MIT in the late 60s, she was one among the 50 or so women students in an entering class of about 1,000 undergraduates. Initially, MIT only had one women’s dorm, limiting the number of women students that could study. When the men’s dorms at MIT became coed, Perlman moved out of the women’s dorm into a mixed dorm floor, where she became the "resident female". She later said that she was so used to the gender imbalance, that it became normal. Only when she saw other women students among a crowd of men she noticed that "it kind of looked weird".
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