Frank Heart

Frank Evans Heart (May 15, 1929 – June 24, 2018) was an American computer engineer influential in computer networking. After nearly 15 years working for MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Heart worked for Bolt, Beranek and Newman from 1966 to 1994, during which he led a team that designed the first routing computer for the ARPANET, the predecessor to the Internet.

Background Born to a Jewish family in The Bronx, New York City, Heart grew up in Yonkers. Taking the course led Heart to complete his undergraduate coursework early. Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon wrote about Heart's management style in their 1996 book Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet:

In 1966, Heart left Lincoln Lab after being recruited by research and development company Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN). In August 1968, BBN won a request for proposal from ARPA to build the first Interface Message Processor (IMP), a computer that transmitted data and interconnected a network known today as a router. Jerry Elkind assigned Heart to be project manager.

With Severo Ornstein as hardware lead and Will Crowther the software lead, Heart's team of ten engineers used a rugged Honeywell DDP-516 minicomputer to engineer the IMP, whose special function was to switch data among the computers on the ARPANET. By September 6, 1968, Heart's team finalized the nearly 200-page, $100,000 IMP proposal, which was BBN's most expensive project to date. The first IMP was installed at the University of California, Los Angeles on September 1, Labor Day of 1969, and the second was installed at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California, a month later on October 1.

Heart, wrote Hafner and Lyon, had become "a highly regarded and valuable project manager" at BBN, because his teams had members "committed to a common mission rather than a personal agenda" and "who took personal responsibility for what they did." Influenced by working at Lincoln Lab for Jay Forrester, the inventor of core memory, Heart prioritized reliability over cost, performance, or other factors, being "a most defensive driver when it came to engineering." He also preferred that his programming teams code working products rather than simulations or software tools. By 1971, Heart's IMP team had grown to 30 and transitioned to a lighter Honeywell 316 for the IMP.

In 1972, Heart appeared in the ARPANET documentary Computer Networks: The Heralds of Resource Sharing.

In 1989, the federal government decommissioned ARPANET. Most of the IMPs were disassembled; a few remain in museums and computer labs. However, many of Heart's core principles, such as reliability and error detection and correction, still exist within the Internet.

In 2014, Heart was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame.

Personal life While working at Lincoln Laboratory, Heart met Jane Sundgaard, one of the company's first women programmers. Jane Heart died in 2014. On June 24, 2018, Frank Heart died of melanoma at age 89 in a retirement community in Lexington, Massachusetts.