IP: Star Ledger articled -- my home twon newspaper

[farber () cis upenn edu <farber () cis upenn edu>]

[ I promised my self I would not send out any more CT articles (me as Chief Tech) but this one is from my "home town" 
newspaper and has some cute rememberances. 

BTW I never called my self the father of the internet and in fact specifically said there were too many Fathers. But 
the press is the press. Other than that it is a good fun article. djf]


Farber the father of the Internet

01/09/00

By Kevin Coughlin

STAFF WRITER

Being chief technologist for the Federal Communications Commission is a 
little like being a champion jigsaw puzzler. It's not enough to know all 
the pieces of the nation's electronic tapestry; you have to know how they 
fit together, too.

So David Farber would seem an ideal choice, a big-picture guy ever since 
his boyhood at Lodi High School -- where he dreamed of a career in 
cosmology, the study of how the universe began.

"But I had a teacher who said you can't earn a living that way," the Jersey 
City native recalls with amusement.

Dubbed "The Paul Revere of the Digital Revolution" by Wired magazine, 
Farber shelved the Big Bang and helped create the Internet instead.

The gadget-slinging professor will spend the next year on leave from the 
University of Pennsylvania as an adviser to the FCC on everything from 
Internet telephone disputes to carving up precious radio airwaves.

If anyone can sort it all out, colleagues say it's the 65-year-old Farber, 
whose lengthy resume includes Bell Labs, Xerox Data Systems and the Rand 
Corp., a defense think-tank.

"Dave comes as close to a Renaissance scientist as one can get," says Hal 
Raveché, president of the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, where 
Farber earned his engineering degree in 1956.

....

http://www.nj.com/business/ledger/e237cb.html