FemTech: Radia Perlman

As a child, Radia Joy Perlman (1951), had never dreamed about being a software engineer. She loved all things art, including classical music, composing music, and writing. Although her mother was a programmer herself, Perlman was introduced into programming in High School. She attended Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the late 1960s and 1970s, she was just one of 50 other women in her class of 1,000 students. At that time, she probably would not have guessed that she would enjoy the field of programming, much less be referred to as the “Mother of Internet” today. As she stated in an interview from The Atlantic, she didn’t even think anything of the gender imbalance in the classes she took until she had a class with another woman. Today, she as a proud alma mater of MIT with a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Mathematics and a Ph.D in Computer Science.

Although this was not her most notable work in her career, it is still necessary to mention Perlman was also known as “the Pioneer of Young Children in Computer Programming”. While still

working as an undergraduate within the LOGO lab, she developed a child-friendly robotics language called “TORTIS” (“Toddler’s Own Recursive Turtle Interpreter System”). According to the research on this language, it was reported that children as young as three years old successfully programmed an educational Robot called a “Turtle”. Of course, the TORTIS’s system of operation was a tangible machine the shape of a physical turtle.

Now onto what made her famous: the invention of the spanning-tree protocol (STP). The STP is an algorithm written in 1985 while Perlman was working for a company called Digital Equipment Corporate. According to the website “For Dummies” tutorial on STP, it serves two functions: one, prevents problems caused by loops on a network; and two, deals with mediating of changes or failures. However, it also caused many errors that arised from it, but it has been recently fixed because of another very notable protocol she invented: TRILL (TRansparent Interconnection of Lots of Links).

Because of how impactful and

revolutionary her work had on how networks self-organize data, Radia Perlman won herself a few honors, such as The Internet Hall of Fame, one of the twenty most influential people in the tech industry by Data Communications magazine, SIGCOMM lifetime achievement award, Silicon Valley Inventor of the Year, and many others. Additionally, she has been a guest speaker at various events around the world as well as lecturing courses at the University of Washington, Harvard University, and MIT. On the side is a video of her accepting her Internet Hall of Fame award.

But being a genius in computer science and mathematics was not the only thing Perlman was outstanding at. She also loved writing. For example, to explain her well-known STP algorithm for those who didn't have background knowledge in computers, she penned a poem to summarize her invention's functions:

Algorhyme

I think that I shall never seea graph more lovely than a tree. A tree whose crucial propertyis loop-free connectivity. A tree that must be sure to spanso packets can reach every LAN. First, the root must be selected. By ID, it is elected. Least-cost paths from root are traced. In the tree, these paths are placed. A mesh is made by folks like me, then bridges find a spanning tree.

In addition, she has also written tech books such as "Interconnections: Bridges, Routers, Switches and Internetworking Protocols" and "Network Security: Private Communication in a Public World". According to an interview from the Silicon Valley Watcher, Perlman describes her books as "very funny" or "stand-up comedy".

Radia Perlman has worked at several places, such as Sun (for 13 years), Novell, and Digital Equipment Corporation, but today she has been working for Intel since March, 2011. She had joined the company as an Intel Fellow, one of the highest technical positions in the company.

In a Gigaom article called "Eight Charts that Put Tech Companies Statistics in Perspective", DeAmicis takes the tech industry's top players, Apple, Twittter, Pinterest, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, eVay, LinkedIn, Cisco, HP, along with Intel and compares their diversity s

tatistics. In 2014, it was reported that three-fourths of the employees at Intel were male. Fortunately, Intel had announced this January that they will spend $300 million to diversify their workforce. Similarly, they will double its referral bonus to employees who suggest adequate job candidates, according to Mike Rogoway from the Oregonian. Additionally, Intel has launched the Intel® She Will Connect program that aims to close the gender gap in education and technology access as well as inspiring and empowering more girls and women to become creators in STEM. By utilizing a combination of digital literacy training, online-peer network, and gender-related content, this program wil help young women improve digital skills and associate that work with opportunities involving government, educational, informational, economic, and health issues. Above is a clip from Intel themselves encouraging girls in the technology industry. Although Intel has a long history of have an overwhelmingly male-dominant workforce, they have set a goal to change their ways and open new doors to females and minorities.

Information on Radia Perlman was fairly easy to get ahold of along with the information on Intel company statistics and the STP. She is undubitably well-known in the computer science world. In fact, she is only ranked the fourth most influential women in tech history by Maximum PC, only behind Ada Lovelace, Admiral Grace Hopper, and Jean Bartik. As stated earlier, she is often referred to as the "Mother of the Internet", although like her successors, she scoffs at the title. She modestly explains that the internet was not invented by one single individual, but she did, indeed, contribute to some fundamental infrastructures. Similarly, when questioned about her gender, Perlman has came to the conclusion that there will always be some subconscious bias in an employer or professor, but besides the huge lack of women in her classes and workplace, she has not had too many sexist experiencees from her peers or colleagues.