Howard Frank

Howard Frank was a network engineer who laid the groundwork for analyzing and designing computer networks.

Career Howard Frank was an academic from 1965, the year he finished his PhD, to 1968 before working for the OEP as a consultant. He then went on to found the Network Analysis Corporation a year later along with a business associate. After selling NAC to Contel Corporation, he created Network Management Incorporated in 1986. He left his corporate career in 1990 to work at DARPA where he was the founding director of Defense Department's Advanced Information Technology Services Joint Program. In 1997 he was appointed as dean of Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland, College Park where he worked until he retired in 2015.

Thesis and continuation of Paul Baran's work His thesis: "Optimum Locations on a Graph with Probabilistic Demands" This insight allowed for the operations detailed in Paul Baran's work to be cut down significantly from the thousands of hours of simulation time originally necessary. Howard Frank explained in one of his interview how this kind of insight perfectly displays his talent: "My talent is that I'm a synthesist. I'm not an original creator of advanced mathematics. Never have been, but as a synthesist, I can take ideas from different fields and put them together, and I could create new things out of that, and because of that, nobody else was working in the field, I was cream skimming. I could say: "What about this?" And nobody would have thought about it yet. Nobody would have worked on it, so I worked on it."

NAC and ARPA After finishing his project at the OEP, in 1969, Howard Frank and Dave Rosenbaum created the Network Analysis Corporation in an effort to solve similar issues than the ones encountered while working at the OEP. Dr Frank was contacted by Lawrence Roberts to work on the topological design of the ARPANET. The NAC, with Howard as its principal investigator on this project, worked on building models with the Control Data 6600 to analyze the network and find ways to optimize it. They analyzed the network and designed upcoming changes and expansions of the network. The NAC also modeled the economics of packet switching on data and voice in a bid to convince companies to adopt this new technology. Howard attended one meeting where he and Lawrence Roberts displayed the advantages of packet switching to AT&T in telephone networks to no avail.

Awards and honours 2013 – inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame by the Internet Society. – received the Presidential Distinguished Service Medal.