I was trying to get a hold of him for years. People who knew him kept saying they'd get me in touch, never did.
His name pops up a lot during the 60s and 70s as an author on numerous articles about networks, often regarding many competing, now defunct alternative networks to the Internet.
Examples of scans I personally made: https://siliconfolklore.com/internet-history/farber-datamati... and https://siliconfolklore.com/internet-history/farber-datamati...
He's one of those people where you go through archival industry journals and are like "oh look there he is again"
For instance, SNOBOL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNOBOL
IP-Asia met every week via Zoom. Several other people whose names appear in the same literature frequented it too. Pop in tonight for the final session?
I had no idea. I can't find out where this is. Can you send me a link
His mailing list was public. No harm in sending the link to the meeting for last week, I guess. You can find the Zoom meeting coordinates there; they were reused every time. https://ip.topicbox.com/groups/ip/T2c0d41d801eaa76c-Mbdfe983...
Met him without knowing who this person was when proposing a decentralized anti-virus platform, he cared and helped a lot. Besides teaching, Dave never stopped learning. Quite a good role model for everyone here.
> After moving to the University of Delaware, Farber helped conceive and organize the National Science Foundation’s Computer Science Network (CSNet), which made then-experimental networking technology available to academic computer scientists and was instrumental in spreading the technology globally, to both industry and academia. Farber also helped plan and develop NSFNET and National Research & Education Network (NREN), efforts that led to the development of the current commercial Internet. Along with Bob Kahn, he conceived the pioneering Gigabit Testbed activity of the NSF.
''In 2018, at the age of 83, Dave moved to Japan to become Distinguished Professor at Keio University and Co-Director of the Keio Cyber Civilization Research Center (CCRC). He loved teaching, and taught his final class on January 22, 2026.
At CCRC, one of his most enjoyable activities was co-hosting the IP-Asia online gathering, which has met every Monday for more than five years and has addressed many aspects of the impact of technology on civilization.''
https://lists.nanog.org/archives/list/nanog@lists.nanog.org/...
these are basically like the things Yogi Berra was famous for saying, like "Nobody goes there any more, it's always too crowded."
and apropos this moment:
You should always go to other people's funerals, otherwise, they won't come to yours. -- Yogi Berra
Thanks for this, it gave me many good chuckles. I feel like I see these kinds of lists less often lately. Does anyone know of some more recent good ones?
Good to see a lot of these archived: https://seclists.org/interesting-people/
What a life lived.
Dave's Interesting People email list was a TRUE highlight of the early Internet.
It was amazing
Was fortunate enough to attend a few guest lectures from him at Stevens when I got my minor degree in science and technology studies. He was so sharp that I was blown away that he was (at the time) 80 years old.
I wonder what his life in Tokyo was like! Did he ever write about it?
"at the too-young age of 91"
Ok I chuckled
Someday soon this won't be humor. I pray for that day.
“Someday soon”
Based on what exactly makes you think this?
Humans have been around for thousands of years. Look at what we've accomplished in the last hundred. We have artificial heart pumps now. In the next two hundred years, if cancer research doesn't slow down too much and if we find some quick fixes for neurodegeneration, I think it's entirely plausible that 90 will become the new 60. I doubt I'll be around for it, and we might never hit the "life extension outpaces people reaching their life expectancy" medical immortality Holy Grail; but in the abstract, there is hope.
Judging by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46923612 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46901862, I expect unsupp0rted's logic is closer to "we'll build superintelligent AI servants some time next week, and that will usher in a new golden age"; but that doesn't make the claim invalid.
On the other hand...all of the medical advances up till now mean some of us (who live in the right place and have enough money) will live better, but up to now, we don't really live longer. People have lived into their 90s for centuries, but a microscopically tiny number even now live into, say, their late 100s. The oldest was 122. And there's nothing concrete on the horizon that says "if we solve this problem, we'll live to 125", much less 200 or 500. If we cured cancer and heart disease tomorrow, that wouldn't change.
Sometime in the next 5 minutes, in evolutionary timescale terms.
We built the first calculating machines yesterday, and a few hours later they took us to the moon. Now we’ve got vastly more powerful ones in our pockets and they have the sum total of all human knowledge and infinite patience for our questions.
Give it a few more minutes. We’ll know soon enough if the sand we’re imbuing with life is our salvation or our doom or something else entirely.
They don't have the sum total of all human knowledge: a lot isn't digitised. Even a large portion of academic knowledge is tied up in oral tradition: how much more is this the case for other fields of endeavour? One cannot learn the local social conventions about waiting tables from reading Not Always Right.
Even in domains where (virtually) all the knowledge is available, and most tasks are exact variations of what has come before, like programming, the most powerful AI systems are mediocre, bordering on competent. Outside this idealised case, they may have "infinite patience for our questions" (up to the token limit, anyway), but they largely lack the capacity to provide answers.
Medical research is about the best example you could pick for something that current-gen AI systems cannot do. Most of the information about the human body is located in human bodies, and wholly inaccessible to every AI system. An extremely important part of medical research is identifying when the established consensus is wrong: how is AI to do that?
There is no reason to believe that LLMs will ever meaningfully contribute to medicine, in much the same sense there is no reason to believe that lawn ornaments will. Pen-and-paper calculations, and the engineering / manufacturing / etc work of humans, took us to the moon: the computers acted as batch processors and task schedulers, nothing more. Medical research done by humans is responsible for the past century of medical improvements. As much as I like computers, they won't be people for the foreseeable future.
Death is horrifying, but an unfounded belief that AI will save you is not a healthy coping mechanism. If you're looking for religion, there are far better ones. And if you don't think you're looking for religion, perhaps the "death gives life meaning" philosophies might suffice? All Men are Mortal by Simone de Beauvoir was presumably some comfort to its author, who also wrote:
> There is no such thing as a natural death: nothing that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into question. All men must die: but for every man his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation.
(quotation from A Very Easy Death via https://martyhalpern.blogspot.com/2011/04/j-r-r-tolkien-quot...)
Ok, I guess I just didn’t think someday soon meant “the next couple hundred years”. I agree with what you’re saying though.
Thanks for all the science, Dave. RIP.
Youtube interview Dave Farber
RIP.
Original email mentions “too young age of 91”, but IMO that’s a beautiful age to reach, especially for a life seemingly well lived!
I think a black bar is in order.
Amen.
is there a list somewhere of people that did cause a black bar?
last email from IP was on Feb 1. Though I really haven't looked at it in years. it used to be much more discussion oriented.
Stevens graduate. Go Ducks!
Another legend of our field has left the stage. RIP.
I never knew him, but I've been lurking on his IP list since the nineties. It was always informative, even as the web made tech news pervasive. Black bar, I reckon.
RIP :-(
RIP Dave
RIP.
RIP. A true computer science legend and Bell Labs alumni.
Another one of the greats gone.
