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Barry Leiner

2003-05-02 11:24:56
Yesterday I discovered that Barry Leiner had died when I saw his obituary in the San Jose Mercury News:

  http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/5759432.htm

Barry was a DARPA program manager and was very involved in the early Internet and the organizations the evolved into the IETF.

I did a search and found the following written by Bob Kahn. It is more eloquent that anything I could say.

Bob

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http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april03/04editorial.html

Memorial Tribute to Barry Leiner

by Robert E. Kahn

Quite unexpectedly, Barry Leiner ? a pioneer in the information technology ? died in his sleep during the early morning hours of April 2, 2003. Our thoughts and prayers go out to his wife Ellen and their two children, Jason and Diedre, along with the rest of their family.

....

Let me turn my attention to a few of Barry's most important contributions. While he became well known in the networking community during the 1980s, a decade later he also became well known in the information management community. His background in communications made him an ideal candidate to take responsibility for the Internet project at DARPA. I had started the project in the early 1970s and Vint Cerf ran it from 1976-1982. By 1983, the technology had matured to the point that DARPA transitioned the ARPANET to the TCP/IP protocols and the operational Internet was put in place. The main issues here were as much organizational and social as they were technical and bureaucratic and required skill in all four areas. Barry Leiner had all four requisite skills to do the job.

.....

This was the essence of Barry Leiner as I knew him. He strove for accomplishment, for fairness and objectivity, for collaboration and organization, for supporting the community whose talents he greatly appreciated and for being a friend and colleague to all who knew him. Barry was a person you could trust. You could talk to him, ask his help or his advice and he would gladly give it if he could. He was truly a giving person. Anyone who ever knew him came away the better for the experience.

I will miss him greatly and I know his friends and colleagues will feel the same.







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