Sharla Boehm facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Sharla Boehm
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Sharla Boehm in 1957
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| Born | December 4, 1929 Seattle, Washington, U.S.
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| Died | April 14, 2023 (aged 93) Santa Monica, California, U.S.
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| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | University of California, Los Angeles |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Packet switching |
| Institutions | RAND Corporation |
Sharla Boehm (born December 4, 1929 – died April 14, 2023) was a smart American computer scientist. She did important work on something called packet switching in the 1960s. She worked at a place called the RAND Corporation.
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Sharla Boehm's Life Story
Sharla Perrine was born in Seattle on December 4, 1929. When she was three years old, her family moved to Santa Monica, California.
She studied mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). After graduating, she taught math and science in schools in Santa Monica.
In 1959, Sharla started working at the RAND Corporation. This is where she met her future husband, Barry Boehm.
Her Big Idea: Packet Switching
In 1964, Sharla Boehm worked with her colleague Paul Baran. They wrote an important paper together. It was about how to send information in a new way.
They called this new way "hot-potato routing," which is now known as packet switching. Imagine sending a letter. Instead of sending the whole letter at once, you break it into small pieces, like puzzle pieces. Each piece is a "packet."
These packets then travel through a network, finding the best path. When they reach the other side, they are put back together.
How Sharla Showed It Worked
Sharla Boehm was the main person behind the computer simulation for this idea. She used a computer language called Fortran to create it. Her simulation showed that packet switching could really work.
Paul Baran explained that Sharla ran many tests. She showed that this new way of sending information was very good at moving data around.
One amazing discovery was what happened if half of the network was broken. The remaining parts of the network would quickly reorganize. They would start sending information again in less than a second!
Her Impact on the Internet
In 1996, Barry Boehm wrote about Sharla's work. He said that Sharla Boehm "had developed the original packet-switched network simulation with Paul Baran." This important work helped lead to the creation of the ARPANET. The ARPANET was an early version of what we now know as the internet.
Sharla Boehm passed away in Santa Monica on April 14, 2023. She was 93 years old. Her work helped lay the foundation for how computers communicate today.
