Perlman has experienced and noticed gender discrepancies within the world of programming including the incorrect preconceived notion from outsiders that being a woman is an advantage during the hiring process. I didn’t have to act condescending and scary when people learned the field from my book.” 2Īs an expert with years of experience learning, inventing, and working in a male dominated field, Dr. Perlman of the book she also claimed changed her life because her solutions to the problems presented to her were so simple, people assumed the problems themselves were simple. It was easy to understand while being conceptually thought-provoking, and a large part of the technology described was stuff I’d invented,” said Dr. Perlman was an Affiliate Professors at the University of Washington, has led lectures at her alma mater and Harvard University, served as the keynote speaker at multiple national and global events organized by tech giants such as Microsoft and Google and has written books such as Interconnections which focused on layer 2 and layer 3 of networks 8. Perlman shared her knowledge through her writings and educational endeavors. In addition to creating prolific protocols, Dr. TRILL was standardized by the International Organization for Standardization and is still used by internet service providers 1, 8, 9. Perlman created TRansparent Interconnection of Lots of Links (TRILL) which was adopted by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) because it “corrected the STP’s flaws, improved its robustness and stability and allowed the efficient forwarding of Ethernet packets using the Intermediate System to Intermediate System (IS-IS) link-state for routing protocol instead of the spanning tree” 8, 9. While STF solved many preexisting problems, it still had weaknesses. STP is integral to the internet because it creates designated pathways for computer to connect to a network and manages traffic so local area networks (LAN) are not overloaded which can cause slower access speeds or networks to crash and it STP also allowed the ethernet to scale out in a feasible manner 1, 7. STP is a protocol that allows computers in a network to communicate with each other across bridges and switches without creating redundancies or loops 6. Perlman created her first of many major contributions to the programming field by developing Spanning Tree Protocol (STP). Perlman became a consulting engineer for the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), an early computer-based company on par with IBM at the time that was exploring how computers could communicate and share files 1, 4. I’d have to remind myself that I was also that “other gender” 2.Īfter working at MIT’s AI Lab, Dr. It was only when occasionally there was a(nother) female in a class that I’d notice that it kind of looked weird…this other gender person looking curiously out of place in the crowd. “It became so normal to me not to see women around that I didn’t notice the gender imbalance. “I went to MIT at a time when the number of females was strictly limited by the number that could fit into the single female dorm, so there were very few women (I think 50 out of a class of 1000),” Dr. Perlman adapted the educational programming language developed by her supervisor into a language called Toddler’s Own Recursive Turtle Interpreter System, or TORTIS for short, which was aimed at children to help them learn programming 3. Perlman was hired as a part-time programmer at her alma mater’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory 1. Perlman attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where she earned a BS and an MS degree in Mathematics in 19 respectively 1. “I never took things apart or built a computer out of spare parts” 2.Īfter excelling in primary and secondary school, Dr. Perlman in an interview with The Atlantic. However, I did not fit the stereotype of the “engineer,” said Dr. I always liked logic puzzles and I found math and science classes in school effortless and fascinating. Perlman was a gifted student in math and science 1. Born on Decemin Portsmouth, Virginia to her father, an engineer, and her mother, a mathematician and computer programmer, Dr. Radia Perlman’s introduction to programming came early.
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