IP: When David J. Farber speaks, technologically savvy

[Dave Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

Subject: When David J. Farber speaks, technologically savvy thinkers listen.
The Penn professor is setting style for plugged-in nerds.


Wired icon


By Michael L. Rozansky


and Dan Stets


INQUIRER STAFF WRITERS


Behold Wired Man.


Seated at a table in a funky West Philadelphia restaurant, he is wearing
sandals with dark socks and a bolo tie. There's a plastic protector in the
pocket of his white short-sleeve shirt, a two-way pager belted above his
right hip, and a tiny cellular telephone hanging by his left hip. He totes
a small zippered case with a personal digital assistant.


Seeing him here, an electronic pack mule, it's hard to believe that David
J. Farber is a hip icon of the wired future.


But he is.


Farber is no ordinary nerd. That's a Mont Blanc pen in his pocket protector
and a $1,000 cellphone on his hip.


And he has some of the most technologically savvy thinkers in industry,
academia and government, from Microsoft to the Central Intelligence Agency,
listening to and discussing his ideas every day.


In fact, this professor of telecommunications at the University of
Pennsylvania, this networking guru and globe-trotting gadget-lover is one
of the most influential nerds in the United States.


In part, it is because of where he has been and what he has done. Farber,
62 and balding, was there at the birth of what is now called the Internet,
and he did more than his share to help it along. He has helped devise
computer-programming languages, electronic telephone switches and
super-high-speed computer networks.


His latest round of celebrity, though, comes from something called his IP
list. IP stands for interesting persons, and it's an electronic mail list
of thousands of people, screened by Farber, who get his daily bulletins,
articles, gadget reviews and jottings.


Wired magazine, the self-appointed arbiter of all that is hip in
cyberspace, this month lauded Farber for having "the technical chops and
the public spirit to be the Paul Revere of the Digital Revolution."


In its "who's in/who's out" list, Wired said the New Yorker's media
columnist Ken Auletta, was "tired;" Farber was "wired."


"They decided it was time to call Dave `wired' because if he isn't, I don't
know who is," says John Perry Barlow, a former lyricist for the Grateful
Dead and an occasional Wired contributor who knows a thing or two about
what's hip.


"It was the personal style of Dave Farber and a very few other people like
him that set the style of the nerd that we find so common today," Barlow
says. "When he first started wearing a pocket protector, chances are nobody
else was wearing one."


Now, Farber, the self-described "techno-yenta," is hot.


"Fame fleets fast," he says, in what sounds suspiciously like a Farberism,
the deliciously mangled metaphors and tortured phrases for which he's also
known. (Gander your eye at that! . . . He deserves a well-rounded hand of
applause . . . He has his neck out on a limb.)


Nursing an iced coffee at the White Dog Cafe, Farber pulls his gadgets off
his belt. Lately he has been musing publicly that he ought to put on weight
to gain belt space.


"The fact I have to carry these three things is absolutely absurd," he
says, removing his cellphone. "This thing should be a message system. It
is, in parts of the world." But not here, yet, so he carries a two-way
Motorola pager to get short e-mail messages and zap back multiple-choice
responses.


"I am stuck carrying around a lot of different pieces that should be
integrated," he says. Does he enjoy testing them? "Yeeaahh," he says, in
his native Jersey City accent. "They're fun. They sometimes get
frustrating. In a sense, it's the only way you know where you want to go."


"Dave has got more gadgets than anybody I know of," says Mitchell Marcus,
chairman of Penn's computer and information science department. "He has
almost a child's delight in neat ideas and neat toys."


Indeed, Farber exudes childlike enthusiasm for technology and occasionally
shows childish delight in being "a troublemaker," the kid in the back of
the class who revels in asking the tough questions.


He likes to think big -- very big. As a high school student, he dreamed of
being a cosmologist, studying the origins of the universe. But a
high-school adviser said he couldn't make a living at it and diverted him
into engineering. Farber headed off to Stevens Institute of Technology in
Hoboken.


In his sophomore year, he worked with a chemistry professor to build an
automatic chemical analyzer. "It was the wildest thing, looking back on
it," he says. It was programmed the old-fashioned way, with computer punch
cards.


The next summer he "lucked out" in a Farber-like way. He landed a job in
one of the few air-conditioned buildings in Washington, doing research on
the first transistor analog computer for the Navy's nuclear-propulsion
program.


"In hindsight, I should have never been in that room because I had no
[security] clearance," he remembers. Besides getting in on the ground floor
in computer research, he also got to sleep in the cooled building at night.


After Stevens, he was admitted for graduate study at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. Before he began, he agreed on a lark to talk with
a recruiter for AT&T's Bell Labs, which was working on the first electronic
telephone switch.


The interview turned into "a violent, actually very crazy argument" because
Farber thought that Bell Labs was building the switch all wrong. The brash
young Farber had nothing to lose -- he was bound for MIT -- but the talk
turned his career around. He was offered work at Bell Labs and stayed 11
years. There he met his wife, GG, a computer programmer, and shifted into
programming and math research, helping to create a popular computer
language called SNOBOL. It was so called because, as Farber tells it, one
day he blurted out in frustration that there wasn't "a snowball's chance in
hell" of finding a good name for it.


At Bell Labs, he again toyed with the idea of leaving for MIT to study the
emerging world of computer science, but was asked, why bother when he was
already in the center of some of the most important computer research in
the world. Later he received a master's degree from Stevens, before moving
to the Rand Corp., where a recruiter had termed him "a national resource."


By the late '70s, Farber had moved to the University of Delaware, where he
helped develop a network called CSNet that linked computer-science
departments at some 500 colleges and universities. "CSNet was a project to
create the first real community network," said another of its creators,
Peter Denning, who chairs the computer science department at George Mason
University.


One of its central features was an electronic mail system, which let
faculty in small, far-flung departments swap ideas. "E-mail is the real,
underlying binding," Farber says, "the person-to-person tissue."


For Farber, e-mail remains the crucial means of communications.


"If all you gave me was the telephone, I would be out of business," he
says. "I couldn't deal with my students, I couldn't deal with anybody. I
certainly couldn't deal with people . . . in Japan and Europe. We'd never
find time to talk to each other."


Gregory Farrington, dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science
at Penn, refers to the "virtual Farber in the real world. Sometimes he's
here, sometimes he's not, but if I try to get him electronically, I can
always get him. He's one of the most engaging, imaginative guys, who
sometimes alternates between great ideas and things that sound nuts. And I
love them both. His life is an elaboration on both."


Farber worked on other ground-breaking networks with such names as NSFNet
and Bitnet II, which were eventually absorbed into today's Internet. In
1989, he joined the University of Pennsylvania. "Probably the thing that
made me make the decision, beside Penn being a great school, was that I
couldn't resist the thought of a non-Ph.D. being a full professor at an Ivy
League School. It was just too much," Farber says. The university says it's
rare in his field, though he isn't its only full-time faculty member
without a Ph.D.


At Penn a few years ago, Farber led a project -- the sort of research
needed to build an information highway -- that shot data from Philadelphia
to Boston at2.4 billion bits per second. That's moving data fast enough to
send the Encyclopedia Britannica in a quarter of a second.


What distinguishes him from many academics, colleagues say, is his penchant
for creative, playful thinking. "Many academic computer scientists focus on
very small technical advances," says Marcus. "Dave reliably focuses on the
very big picture."


It was that ability and his technological sophistication that Barlow and
Mitchell Kapor to ask Farber to be one of the first board members of the
Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the premier civil-liberties
organization in cyberspace.


"We just knew that he understood the dimension we were dealing with as well
as anyone could," Barlow says. "He had the right instincts and he had a
great deal of personal clout with the old-boy network that created the
Internet."


"He's a very wise person about computers and networks and how they are used
in the real world," said Kapor, the father of Lotus 1-2-3. He wanted Farber
to join EFF not just because he's "technologically deep," but also because
"he had a sense of how the technology could affect people's lives."


That sense of technology's real-world usefulness is a recurring thread in
the IP list. Last week Farber reviewed his two-way pager ("Bottom line, the
2way is damn useful") and apologized for the "mess" created by an e-mail
program he was testing ("I hate software"). In between, the IP list
featured the administration's views on the communications revolution,
plugged-in Finns, and Japan's attitudes toward cryptography.


"It's very useful," says Dorothy Denning, a computer science professor at
Georgetown University and the wife of Peter Denning. "It's probably the
best list that I'm on."


The list began nine years ago when a friend of Farber's asked him to send
along interesting things that he'd seen. It has since spiraled into a
nationally known tip sheet, read by as many as 25,000 people, which
reflects Farber's interests, prejudices and passions. One story has it that
senior White House staff members at work on the information highway put out
Letterman-esque list of the Top 10 reasons to love the Internet.


Among the 10, as Farber himself proudly tells it, was: "`So we can wake up
every morning and get our marching orders from Dave Farber."


For More Information


David Farber's home page on the Internet can be browsed at:
http://macpond.cis.upenn.edu