Norman Abramson Papers
Fonds — Box: 1
Identifier: MANUSCRIPT-UA00052
Dates
- 1961 -1994
Creator
- Abramson, Norman (Person)
Extent
.83 Linear Feet (3/4 of record box filled with letter-length folders and 1.5" 3-ring binder containing 20 sheets of color slides.) : Text comprised of handwritten notes, typed, and photocopies for courses. Two published works; conference proceedings and technical report for U.S. government.
Biographical / Historical
Norman Manuel Abramson (April 1, 1932 – December 1, 2020) was an American engineer and computer scientist, most known for developing the ALOHAnet system for wireless computer communication. Abramson earned a B.A. in physics from Harvard University (1953), a M.A. in physics from UCLA (1955), and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University (1958). His thesis at Stanford focused on the area of communication theory.
Abramson worked part time during the academic year and during summers as part of a Hughes Fellowship during his graduate studies from 1955-1958. Upon receiving his PhD he joined the Stanford University faculty in 1958. In fall of 1965 Abramson was a visiting professor at University of California at Berkeley. During a sabbatical from Stanford, he taught at Harvard, 1965-1966. During the summer of 1966 was spent in Washington, D.C. with a Defense Department agency. While traveling back and forth on occasional consulting trips to NEC in Tokyo, he met Wes Peterson of UHM who offered him a job. He joined the faculty at the University of Hawaii (1966–94), serving as professor of both Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Some of his early research concerned radar signal characteristics and sampling theory, as well as frequency modulation and digital communication channels, error correcting codes, pattern recognition and machine learning and computing for seismic analysis.
One of Abramson's first projects at the University of Hawaii was to develop radio technology to help the school send and receive data from its remote geographic location to the continental United States, funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency. A key innovation in the technology was to divide the data in packets which could be resent if the data was lost during transmission, allowing for random access rather than sequential access, based on the same principles being developed for ARPAnet, the precursor of the modern Internet. The resulting radio network technology his team developed was deployed as ALOHAnet in 1971, based on the dual-meaning of the Hawaiian word "aloha". ALOHAnet became the foundation of modern wireless communication as well as influencing the development of Ethernet-based communications.
He then took as he says, “a pretty big gamble,” and accepted a professorship at the University of Hawaii (1968- ).That big gamble quickly paid off, for in the next year the Department of Defense announced the Themis program to aggressively fund research at “second tier” universities, universities like the University of Hawaii. Abramson, who very much wanted to do research, teamed up with two of his new faculty members, Wes Peterson and Ned Weldon, and others, and conceived a research program that was funded by ARPA and managed by Bob Taylor and Larry Roberts at the IPTO. To become known as ALOHAnet, it proved that broadcast radio communications could be the basis of an inter-island communication system. As important as this finding was, how ALOHAnet influenced Bob Metcalfe’s thinking and led to Ethernet is the story investigated in this interview and the interviews with Metcalfe, Charlie Bass and John Davidson: for Ethernet is one of the important and crowning achievements in the early history of computer communications.
Abramson continued to serve as a professor at Hawaii until 1994 when he retired. Abramson went on to co-found Aloha Networks in San Francisco, where he served as the CTO.
Creator
- Abramson, Norman (Person)
- Title
- Norman Abramson Papers
- Status
- in_progress
- Author
- Helen Wong Smith
- Date
- July 20, 2022
- Language of description
- English
- The Computer History Museum holds transcription of interview with Abramson cited in Biographical note.
Repository Details
Part of the University of Hawaii at Manoa Libraries Repository
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