"There are some things that can't be controlled."
- Leonard Kleinrock
Leonard Kleinrock's most well-known and significant work is his early work on queueing theory, which has applications in many fields, among them as a key mathematical background to packet switching, the basic technology behind the internet.
At the age of 6, Kleinrock was reading a Superman comic at his apartment in Manhattan, when he found plans for building a crystal radio. To do what he intended, he took his father's used razor blade, a piece of pencil lead, an empty toilet paper roll, and some wire, all of which he had no trouble obtaining. In addition, he needed an earphone which he promptly appropriated from a public telephone booth. The one remaining part was something called a "variable capacitor".
He went to the subway down to the center for radio electronics at Canal Street with his mother. After seeing what he wanted, the clerk sold him just what he needed. Kleinrock built the crystal radio and was totally hooked when "free" music came through the earphones - no batteries, no power, and all free. Since then, an engineer was born.
Early Life
Leonard Kleinrock was born in New York City on June 13th, 1934 to a Jewish family. He has a sister that is a year older than him.
When he was just around 8 years old. He remembered a particular book called Elements of Radio by Marcus. The book that explained not only the mathematics – which was hard to read – but gave excellent and intuitive descriptions of electrons moving, filaments heating up, electrons boiling off. It explained in layman's terms and in a way Kleinrock could understand as a young child. He would read that book late into the night. To him, it was magical. He taught myself all about radios. There was a lot of war surplus equipment available and there were many war surplus training manuals that were written for the military. There was also the very informative RCA Radio Tube Manual which had a terrific tutorial section on radio. He managed to find these manuals through magazine ads, in the Canal Street electronic stores, in hobby shops, and most of them were free.
Kleinrock loved going to elementary school. He was in a class with smart kids. "The thing I liked about school was that it was orderly and structured. When I made progress, I was graded accordingly – as opposed to my home life, which was very unstructured."
Kleinrock spent the next few years cannibalizing discarded radios as he sharpened his electronics skills. He went to Bronx High School of Science and appended his studies with courses in Radio Engineering.
He graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1951. When the time came to go to college, he found he could not afford to attend, even at the tuition-free City College of New York (CCNY), and so he enrolled in their evening session program while working full time as an electronics technician/engineer and bringing a solid paycheck home to his family. He received a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering degree in 1957 from the City College of New York, and a master's degree and a doctorate (Ph.D) in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1959 and 1963 respectively.
He then joined the faculty at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), where he remains to the present day; during 1991–1995 he served as the Chairman of the Computer Science Department there. Since then in UCLA, he also has served as a Professor of Computer Science.
Career
ARPANET and the Internet
ARPA had been supporting a number of computer scientists around the country and, as new researchers were brought in, they naturally asked ARPA to provide a computer on which they could do their research; however, ARPA reasoned that this community of scientists would be able to share a smaller number of computers if these computers were connected together by means of a data network. Because of his unique expertise in data networking, Leonard Kleinrock was called to Washington to play a key role in preparing a functional specification for the ARPANET - a government-supported data network that would use the technology which soon came to be known as "packet switching".
Kleinrock refers to September 2, 1969, as the day the infant internet took its first breath of life. Due to Kleinrock's fundamental role in establishing data networking technology over the preceding decade, ARPA decided that UCLA, under Kleinrock's leadership, would become the first node to join the ARPANET. This meant that the first internet switch (Interface Message Processor - IMP) would be delivered to his laboratory on the Labor Day weekend, 1969, and the UCLA team of 40 people that Kleinrock organized would have to provide the ability to connect the first host computer to the IMP.
The first message on the ARPANET was sent by UCLA student programmer Charley Kline, at 10:30pm, on October 29, 1969 from Boelter Hall 3420, the school's main building. Supervised by Kleinrock, Kline transmitted from the university's SDS Sigma 7 host computer to the Stanford Research Institute's SDS 940 host computer. The message text was the word "login"; the "l" and the "o" letters were transmitted, but the system then crashed. Hence, the literal first message over the ARPANET was "lo". About an hour later, having recovered from the crash, the SDS Sigma 7 computer effected a full "login".
The first permanent ARPANET link was established on November 21, 1969, between the IMP at UCLA and the IMP at the Stanford Research Institute. By December 5, 1969, the entire four-node network was established.
In 1988, Kleinrock was the chairman of a group that presented the report Toward a National Research Network to the U.S. Congress. This report was highly influential and was used to develop the High Performance Computing Act of 1991, that was influential in the development of the internet as it is known today. Funding from the bill was used in the development of the 1993 web browser Mosaic, at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).
Room 3420 at Boelter Hall was restored to its condition of 1969 and converted into The Kleinrock Internet Heritage Site and Archive. It opened to the public with a grand opening attended by internet pioneers October 29, 2011.
Ventures
Leonard Kleinrock was the first President and co-founder of Linkabit Corporation, the co-founder of Nomadix, Inc., and Founder and Chairman of TTI/Vanguard, an advanced technology forum organization.
He has published over 250 papers and authored six books on a wide array of subjects, including packet switching networks, packet radio networks, local area networks, broadband networks, gigabit networks, nomadic computing, intelligent software agents, performance evaluation, and peer-to-peer networks. During his tenure at UCLA, Kleinrock has supervised the research for 47 Ph.D students and numerous M.S students. These former students now form a core group of the world's most advanced networking experts.
Kleinrock is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an IEEE fellow, an ACM fellow, an INFORMS fellow, an IEC fellow a Guggenheim fellow, and a founding member of the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Research Council.
Awards And Personal Life
Leonard Kleinrock has received numerous professional awards. Kleinrock was selected to receive the prestigious National Medal of Science, the nation's highest scientific honor, from President George W. Bush in the White House on September 29, 2008. "The 2007 National Medal of Science to Leonard Kleinrock for his fundamental contributions to the mathematical theory of modern data networks, and for the functional specification of packet switching, which is the foundation of Internet technology.
He also recieved the L.M. Ericsson Prize, the NAE Charles Stark Draper Prize, the Marconi International Fellowship Award, the Dan David Prize, the Okawa Prize, the IEEE Internet Millennium Award, the ORSA Lanchester Prize, the ACM SIGCOMM Award, the NEC Computer and Communications Award, the Sigma Xi Monie A. Ferst Award, the CCNY Townsend Harris Medal, the CCNY Electrical Engineering Award, the UCLA Outstanding Faculty Member Award, the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award, the UCLA Faculty Research Lecturer, the INFORMS President's Award, the ICC Prize Paper Award, the IEEE Leonard G. Abraham Prize Paper Award, and the IEEE Harry M. Goode Award.
His mentoring of generations of students has led to the commercialization of technologies that have transformed the world." In 2010 he shared the Dan David Prize. In 2012, Kleinrock was inducted into the internet Hall of Fame by the Internet Society.
Leonard Kleinrock is married to his high school friend whom he was attracted in Physics classes.