‘Grandfather of the Internet,’ Stevens Alumnus Leaves a Lasting Legacy
When David J. Farber ’56 M.S. ’61 Hon. Eng. ’99 accepted the Stevens Honor Award in 2014, he made two things abundantly clear: He loved to learn and he loved to teach.
Farber, an Emeritus Trustee who was inducted into the Pioneers Circle of the Internet Hall of Fame in 2013, passed away on Feb. 7 at the age of 91. He was still teaching through late January as a distinguished professor at Keio University in Tokyo, where he also served as the co-chair of the Cyber Civilization Research Center. His lifelong passion for education was only strengthened during his time at Stevens.
“As a Stevens undergraduate, I had a ball here. It taught me many, many things outside of electrical engineering,” he said during his acceptance speech at the 2014 Stevens Award Gala. “The teachers here were just superb. Dr. Strong, who supervised our senior project, was an inspiration and got me very interested in what became my career.”
As a Stevens undergraduate, Farber earned a M.E. degree focusing on electrical engineering in 1956. He then started his career at Bell Labs — where he helped design the first electronic switching system — and learned under pioneers such as two-time Nobel Prize winning physicist John Bardeen and Claude Shannon, the “father of the information age.” These teachers, he said, taught him theory but did it in a way using the research they were conducting right in their laboratories.
“What that taught me is something that has stayed with me throughout my entire academic career: Students deserve the best faculty that we can supply them, and our faculty has to be current,” he said. “It has to be people doing research who are on the forefront of information because they’ll transmit that love of science and engineering to their students.”
Farber himself transmitted that love when he moved on to academia, holding various appointments and professorships at Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Pennsylvania, UC Irvine and the University of Delaware. He wrote several computer languages that helped develop the early web and taught many who went on to contribute their own innovations, earning him the distinction of being dubbed the “grandfather of the internet.”
Throughout his career, Farber served as chief technologist for the FCC, on the U.S. Presidential Advisory Committee on Information Technology, on the National Research Council and on the Advisory Board on Computer Science at the National Science Foundation, among others. He was a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and he received the Sigcomm Award for his lifelong contributions to communications and the John Scott Award for Contributions to Humanity.
He was also a force on Stevens’ campus, where, additionally, he earned his master’s in mathematics in 1961 and was awarded an honorary degree in 1999. He was inducted into the Stevens Hall of Achievement in 2016 and continued to invest in the success of the university through the Farber Chair in computer science, a faculty fellowship in the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences and prizes that reward our seniors for their own societal impact.
“Dr. Farber did not just witness the future; he helped create it,” said Stevens President Nariman Farvardin. “His impact on campus has been felt for decades — as a student, trustee, mentor and friend — and will continue to be felt through his generosity, which will benefit generations of Stevens’ faculty and students yet to come.”
It’s a legacy of teaching and learning that would make Farber proud.
“In academia, I learned another thing that has also stuck with me and I recommend it to you: Faculty members live and die by their students,” Farber said. “It’s a two-way street. [Many of my students] fed back into me the stimulation that led me to new ideas, and that’s a very valuable cycle … Faculty are only as good as their students, and the best students we can get, the best research we can get.”
