Sharla Boehm, the programmer whose code underpins the Internet | Hacker News Reader

Sharla Boehm, the programmer whose code underpins the Internet

scientificamerican.com

143 pointsdxs30 comments

This would have made for an interesting article, but as a podcast transcript it's virtually unreadable. It also reads like they're talking to children. The Wikipedia article is much better, but too short:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharla_Boehm

It's sort of the NPR-style playbook, minus the tonality, perhaps.

Some audiences are logical and want concise, dense information, others want relational and narrative approaches.

It's also completely blocked for me, thanks for a link I can actually read!

I wish if it was article as @anigbrowl suggested too, the transcription format was a bit confusing but overall it was a very interesting read. I do dislike the fact that the article compares it to machine learning and AI buzzwords because what Sharla did was unique & great in her own regards but shouldn't be compared to ML.

but aside from that, The most interesting thing to me was that I must admit it but the level of humbleness within Sharla is quite something of another level.

Like she had PhD from UCLA in mathematics and she was teaching maths at high school, joining RAND in the side and taking the side and in some sense meaningfully contributing to the making of internet, yet still being humble all throughout.

I really enjoyed this statement: Friends who knew Sharla say she should absolutely be celebrated for her technological achievements, but not reduced to them because she did so much more with her life.

In a world so focused on achievements and advancements, money/fame. I really liked this line. Another one that I really liked: By the time Sharla Perrine Boehm died in 2023, at the age of 93, nearly two-thirds of the world’s population was using the internet that she had unknowingly helped usher in as a young computer programmer.

But throughout her decades as a teacher, mother, and community leader, she also touched many lives much more intimately. She was the woman supporting so many girls, focused not on her own legacy, but on theirs, on how much they could accomplish, now that the world was theirs.

I don't know but there is just something so profoundly fascinating when someone does good deeds when they are not visible. Just being a good person for the sake of it. I am sure her life had ups and downs but from reading this article, she did the things that she enjoyed which were programming and she was an interesting person. I do feel a bit greatful that I got to read about her and know about her.

My point is, reading the article, it seems that she did these things just because she could and that it was fun to her in some sense to her all at the same time being humble and being a person just so much more than just these achievements overall too. I do hope to take some aspects of that spirit from her hopefully too.

I sometimes get the impression that these people like Sharla only exist in a different century altogether but I sometimes feel like we might already be surrounded by people like Sharla's even in the present but just as Sharla's life, they were hidden and that is precisely why we mighn't know about them. This does give a bit of hope in humanity to me, lets hope that we are able to overcome our flaws and just get for a better future indeed.

When my maternal grandmother died, her obit listed all the things she did: organist at her church, leader of a local association of farmers' wives, organizer of community events, etc. On top of raising six kids and helping run a farm which was an actual business that needed to be profitable YoY. I was like... wow.

I'm also reminded about how the guy from Project Hail Mary, despite getting the opportunity to return home to a hero's welcome, decided to stay and teach the children of Rocky's race about science. (Oops, spoiler...)

A great lightning talk on the same subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCdEhYVHvzw

I wonder why the speaker refers to her with her maiden name. Was it her preference?

Seems from Wikipedia she was unmarried at the time of at least some of the significant work, is published and credited as Perrine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharla_Boehm

https://archive.ph/VlbdQ

For some reason that particular site sticks me into a CAPTCHA loop. (it does work after I open it incognito though, but I still get hit with a CAPTCHA the first time)

https://web.archive.org/web/20260520202425/https://serjaimel...

Here you go. Hope you enjoy the article, I am gonna go read it too now.

(PS: I have created htmlpipe and I have written enough about it in submissions/comments etc. so I will hopefully let the project speak for itself now but feel free to ask me any questions as I love to talk and also a minor wish but I hope that more people could use my software but no biggies if they don't as I am happy using it for myself because I built it for myself and to help others! Have a nice day)

And married to Barry Boehm of Software Engineering Economics fame. That was one smart couple!

Ah, not related to Hans Boehm of the Boehm GC though (the Barry Boehm page even has a "not to be confused with" header.)

I thought of that too. Seems like the right last name to have.

Which I discovered recently, is still working with GCs, the ART GC to be more precise.

Came here to see if that was the case. Thanks.

> If this was 2025, this would be called machine learning because that's really what it was.

It would be called "machine learning" because that's the buzzword du jour.

> She was teaching the network to learn how to respond to nodes dropping out.

That's just called "writing software" not "teaching the network."

> Machine learning was definitely nonexistent at that point.

Are you sure about that?

> And yet, if you look at this 1964 paper, it's kind of unquestionably what it is.

The document: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/RM3103.html

The claim: highly questionable.

The paper is interesting in it's own right, but, to hype it up in this way is gross.

> That's just called "writing software" not "teaching the network."

I would have expected better from Scientific American. The transcript read as very repetitive.

Also if you read Wikipedia it looks like the main contribution was a simulator.

> > Machine learning was definitely nonexistent at that point.

> Are you sure about that?

Incredible statement to make, not only did machine learning exist, but neural networks existed!

The first perceptrons were built in the 50s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptron

If you take a machine learning class, what is the most basic network you will probably build/learn about as an introduction? The MLP - multi-layer perceptron.

It's not even remotely obscure to know ML existed in the 50s and 60s.

It's interesting reading how TTL evolved from the 'handover' field (p14-16).

topics like this are why i come to HN

TLDR: Sharla Boehm helped invent packet switching, a.k.a. "hot potato routing", and wrote the first implementation which proved that it could work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharla_Boehm

[And/But] whose code is [/not] present in today’s packet routing code

Do we know which?

Since it was a simulation written in Fortran, the odds of it actually being used for routing is pretty small.

I bet someone read the paper she co-authored and that might have had some influence on the code that they ended up writing. Her husband worked on ARPAnet, surely he would have mentioned that paper to someone!

Her husband almost certainly didn't need to - she co-authored with Paul Baran; the insights from this work were directly influential on his subsequent work, and both this work and RAND's larger corpus of work in this area were part of the reference materials used by ARPA (which we know today as DARPA) began the Arpanet project, which was the foundation for today's Internet.

No, she wrote a simulation of packet switching to help characterize how it would behave under various failure scenarios.

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