Radia Perlman truly is the Mother of the Internet. Her work was foundational and her approach remains relevant today. She continues to solve emerging challenges. She is steadfast and deserves to be celebrated.

As a woman who flew fighters in the Air Force, I am always fascinated by women who excel in predominantly male fields - How they adapt, how they are treated and valued, how their accomplishments are or are not recognized, and how they persevere or are pushed out.

In 2014, Radia Perlman was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame and into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2016. She also received lifetime achievement awards from USENIX and the Association for Computing Machinery’s SIGCOMM.

Within 5 days she had documented STP entirely and spent the rest of the week on her poem, “Algorhyme.” STP is foundational. Instead of networks that were limited to a few hundred nodes in a single building, hundreds of thousands of computers could be supported around the world.

Her STP solution was simple and elegant – algorithms that organize network connections with a single pathway between two points, like a tree, with back-ups incase the primary way fails. It was so simple the engineers tasked to build it did not have any questions.

At MIT’s AI lab, she developed a programming system for kids as young as three. Her ability to make complex systems accessible would become a defining principle of her career and influence education for decades.

ARPA solved problems that the military refers to as “DARPA hard.” After ARPANET, we never looked back. Those who made the internet did extraordinary work & these women inspire girls, women, & all those who learn about their accomplishments to do hard things. We must tell their stories with the rest.

Remember the women IHOF Inductees? They are Andres, Baker, Banks, Breeden, Claffy, Lowinder, Esterhuysen, Estrada, Feinler, Gerich, Hafkin, Holz, Hu, Hubbard, Kanchanasut, Dorcas Muthoni, Parket, Perlman, Armour Polly, Reynolds, Tarouco, Travers, & Zhang. www.internethalloffame.org/inductees/all/

Then there’s Radia Perlman, a member of the IHOF and National Inventors Hall of Fame who is considered the Mother of the Internet. She created the spanning-tree protocol that bridges computer networks so they can share information.
www.invent.org/inductees/ra...

Ever wonder why we call it “debugging?” You can thank Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, who pulled a literal moth out of a machine. When others said it couldn't be done, in 1956, her team ran the first programming language to use words rather than symbols. president.yale.edu/biography-gr...

Here are some of the women who made the internet possible or what it is today. Ada Lovelace was the first computer programmer in the 1800s and the first to express the idea that computers had potential beyond mathematics. www.computerhistory.org/babbage/adal... & www.britannica.com/biography/Ad...