David J. Farber, a gregarious professor of computer networks who was sometimes called the “grandfather of the internet” because of the ultimately groundbreaking students he trained, died on Feb. 7 in Tokyo. He was 91.
His son Emanuel said the apparent cause was heart failure. Professor Farber had been teaching at Keio University in Tokyo since 2018.
When Professor Farber started his career in the mid-1950s, at Bell Laboratories, computers were practically islands unto themselves. If they communicated at all, they talked by means of a Teletype or punch card reader down the hall.
Since then, thanks in part to his work, the realms of communication and computation merged into that one powerful glue for society that is the internet; The New York Times once described him as “an early architect” of it.