Frank Heart, the engineer who oversaw development of the first routing computer for the Arpanet, the precursor to the internet, died on Sunday at a retirement community in Lexington, Mass. He was 89.
The cause was complications of melanoma, his son Bennet said.
In 1969, Mr. Heart led a small team of talented young engineers to build the Interface Message Processor, or I.M.P., a computer whose special function was to switch data among the computers on the Arpanet. To this day, many of the principles Mr. Heart emphasized — reliability, error resistance and the capacity for self-correction — remain central to the internet’s robustness.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/25/technology/frank-heart-who-linked-computers-before-the-internet-dies-at-89.html