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Larry Roberts (computer scientist)

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  1. Larry Roberts (computer scientist)
Larry Roberts (computer scientist)
American electrical engineer and Internet pioneer
BornLawrence Gilman Roberts
(1937-12-21)December 21, 1937
Westport, Connecticut, U.S.
DiedDecember 26, 2018(2018-12-26) (aged 81)
Redwood City, California
EducationMassachusetts Institute of Technology
Known forARPANET, founding father of the Internet
AwardsInternet Hall of Fame, 2012
IEEE Computer Pioneer Award
IEEE Computer Society W. Wallace McDowell Award
ACM SIGCOMM Award
Harry H. Goode Memorial Award
International Engineering Consortium Fellow award, 2001 of the National Academy of EngineeringPrincipe de Asturias Award, 2002Secretary of Interface Conference AwardL.M. Ericsson prize for research in data communications, 1982

Charles Stark Draper Prize


Defense Meritorious Service Medal


FieldsComputer science
WorkplacesMIT Lincoln Laboratory, ARPA, Telenet, Anagran
Academic advisorsSteven Anson Coons

Lawrence Gilman Roberts (December 21, 1937 – December 26, 2018) was an American computer scientist and Internet pioneer.45

For other people named Lawrence Roberts, see Lawrence Roberts (disambiguation).

As a program manager and later office director at the Advanced Research Projects Agency, Roberts and his team created the ARPANET, the first wide-area computer network to implement packet switching techniques invented by British computer scientist Donald Davies and American engineer Paul Baran.67 The ARPANET's principal designer was Bob Kahn, alongside several other computer scientists from Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN) who worked on the Interface Message Processors (IMPs) and their communication protocols. Roberts asked Leonard Kleinrock to apply mathematical methods to model and measure the performance of the network. In the 1970s, ARPA sponsored research on communication protocols for internetworking, using concepts pioneered by Louis Pouzin, that led to the development of the modern Internet.

After his work at ARPA, Roberts became CEO of the commercial packet-switching network Telenet, the first public data network in North America.

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General
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This article
Reading time
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Topic
Computer Science
Quality
C-class
Views
182 in 14 days
Last edited
2 Nov 2026
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Last edited
2 Nov 2026