University of Delaware professors and students have played an important role in the advancement of technology. Two faculty members played key roles in the development of the Internet, another is making strong contributions in supercomputing and another has developed a computer interface that could eventually replace the mouse and mechanical keyboard. A UD alumnus is credited with inventing the first personal computer and a student who is continuing his graduate studies at the University helped unlock the programming secrets of the Melissa virus.

Timing is everything

They call him "Father Time." Not because he was among the researchers who helped construct both the Internet and its predecessors, which he was. Not because he was one of the first Americans to have a computer terminal in the house, to telecommute or to have a T1 line to his home, all of which he did.

Rather, David Mills is called "Father Time" for his continuing work with the crucial Network Time Protocol. The protocol enables precise time synchronization, without which online experiments could not be accurately measured and controlled, stock market buy and sell orders could not be timed and web streaming of video would be chaotic. The protocol makes possible such online activities as aviation traffic control and monitoring, radio and TV programming launch and control, multimedia synchronization for real-time teleconferencing and traffic engineering.

Mills was among a group of researchers who helped build the Internet, with which he has been associated for the network's entire life. He recalls the U.S. Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA) providing the engineers "a $15 million sandbox" in which to create something completely new.

"DARPA asked us to make it work and we asked them how they wanted us to do it," Mills says. "DARPA said, 'We don't know, you tell us.' It was great fun. To an engineer and a born tinkerer, there was nothing better.

"The strangest thing about the whole process is that we were inventing e-mail, file transfer protocols and remote interactive access, using the very infrastructure that we were developing," Mills says. "In other words, we were building the infrastructure so that we could build the infrastructure. I learned the most important lesson of my life from this experience--that people who are actually going to use services should be the ones to build them."

Mills, who served as chairman of the Internet Architecture Task Force for many years and also was a member of the Internet Activities Board, said the main unforeseen circumstance in moving the net from a largely military and research application to widespread general use was the advent of the ubiquitous home computer. "We didn't foresee that computers would get so powerful and so cheap," he says.

Mills says the next big change will be in increasing the rate of transfer of information from the Internet's main backbone to the home. Once the home computer can receive data at the rate of a T1 line and beyond--the normal modem can carry data at about 30,000 bits per second compared to 192,000 bits per second on a T1 line--Mills believes "things will really change."

"Suddenly, you won't need to have a cable television line, a telephone or a satellite dish," he says. All that those services now provide will be available on the desktop computer.

The major issue now is not technical engineering but social and economic engineering, Mills says, with hackers attacking the Internet and bandwidth being eaten up with a flood of unwanted e-mail.

"I tell my students there are two areas in which they can get rich," he says, "computer security and the modification or creation of new protocols to deal with abuses. We need to design protocols that are robust and resistant against the 14-year-old hackers."

E-mail nation

David J. Farber, who has been hailed as one of the 25 most important people in the world in the field of networking by one technology magazine and as the "Paul Revere of the Internet" by another, was on the University of Delaware faculty through the 1970s and much of the 1980s before moving to the University of Pennsylvania and, more recently, to Carnegie Mellon University.

While at Delaware, Farber helped develop the CSNet, or the Computer Science Network, which linked computer science departments at more than 500 colleges and universities.

Funded by the National Science Foundation, CSNet was the first electronic community network, and pivotal to its usefulness was an electronic mail system that enabled the quick and easy exchange of information and ideas.

The system was expanded as the National Research and Education Network, into which was built the components for commercial connections that evolved into the modern Internet.

Farber, who has served a chief technologist for the Federal Communications Commission and testified in the Microsoft trial, believes that interpersonal communication, through both e-mail and instant messages, remains the strength of the Internet.

A key goal, he said in an interview on WHYY-FM radio, should be to stretch broadband access into offices and homes, enabling people to "live where they want to live, work where they want to work, learn where they want to learn."

 Build it simple

Born in Thailand and raised in India, the late Adam Osborne, a University of Delaware chemical engineering alumnus, is credited with having invented the world's first portable computer.

Osborne, who died in March 2003, in India, enrolled at UD in the 1960s after having worked for several large engineering firms. He graduated from the University in 1968 with a degree in chemical engineering and went back into the corporate world before turning to technical writing as an outlet for his talents.

In 1975, Osborne wrote the self-published book "An Introduction to Microcomputers," which proved a popular sell on the eve of the personal computer revolution. He continued to write about computers, even developing a small publishing company that was eventually purchased by McGraw-Hill.

In 1981, Osborne formed the Osborne Computer Corporation and introduced the world's first portable computer, the Osborne I, at the West Coast Computer Fair held that same year in California.

The computer, which weighed more than 20 pounds, was wildly popular for a time but the company collapsed into bankruptcy by 1983.

Osborne co-authored a book on the subject called "Hypergrowth: The Rise and Fall of Osborne Computer Corporation." In it, he says that as a student of the microcomputer scene it became apparent that low prices were the key to success.

"This revolution had overtones of an earlier one: the automobile industry," he writes. "Microcomputers were clearly the American public's next great love affair. But what could I do to compete with Radio Shack and Apple? The idea was simple: no-frills computing. This concept can best be summarized with one of my favorite sayings: 'Adequacy is sufficient; everything else is irrelevant.'"

The other microcomputers of the day were unwieldy, put together in what Osborne calls "innumerable boxes that had to be plugged together in a maze of wiring and cables."

He writes that he believed that if the market was to expand, "it would have to rely on customers who would plug a computer into the wall, as they might a toaster. The wires and cables had to go so the new computer could come integrated into a single package."

Hence, Osborne designed the smallest possible computer package, creating the first portable computer. It was, in fact, designed to fit neatly under an airline seat.

The Osborne computer was unique among the products of the day in that it came loaded with a software package that included word processing and spreadsheet programs, enabling users to plug the machine in and begin making immediate use of it.

Before falling ill in 1992, Osborne launched a software company that sold programs at low prices. He spent his last days in India.

Super systems

Guang R. Gao, professor of electrical and computer engineering and director of the high performance Computer Architectures and Parallel Systems Laboratory, is one of the world's leaders in the design of high performance computers. His work is of great importance at the Delaware Biotechnology Institute, where bioinformatics supply information that is vital to genomic research. In addition, Gao is leading a UD team that is part of a consortium working with IBM on a national initiative to regain preeminence in supercomputing.

The goal of the DARPA program is to provide a new generation of economically viable, scalable, high productivity computing systems for use in national security and industry by 2010.

Falling behind the Japanese in the field of supercomputing has been a "wake up call," Gao said, adding that the result of the DARPA project will be "a supercomputing architecture roadmap" that will provide very high speed, high performance computing to meet a variety of needs.

Gao said UD is joined on the IBM team by a number of other universities, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cornell University, the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Texas at Austin.

UD was selected for the project "because of our pretty unique long-term work in the area of programming models for communication and data management within large computer systems, some involving hundreds of thousands of individual processors," Gao said.

In such a computer system, communications between the individual processors is a major problem, Gao said, because so much information is being input, digested, shared and ultimately output.

Through earlier work, Gao's laboratory established that such systems work best through decentralized rather than centralized control. He explained the finding by comparing it to a political system. In a centralized system, a scientist asked for information must relay the request through many layers of supervisors before being allowed to provide an answer. In a more open system, the scientist can decide on his or her own to respond, thus speeding the process immensely.

"In a large computer system, it is our belief that this has to happen," Gao said. To make it happen, the team must write special programs that take into account threading, or the execution of individual tasks, data movement and a consistent way to deal with new information being fed into the system.

Much as manufacturers have gone to just-in-time delivery of parts, Gao said the UD team is seeking to provide for just-in-time delivery of data to improve performance. Information will arrive when needed and so not clog up the system.

According to DARPA, the program will fill a gap in high-end computing that the Department of Defense will experience as it moves from today's high performance computing technology, which dates from the late 1980s, to the future promise of quantum computing.

Technology at your fingertips

John Elias, UD professor of electrical and computer engineering, and former doctoral student and current UD visiting assistant professor Wayne Westerman have developed a revolutionary computer interface technology that promises to replace the traditional mouse and mechanical keyboard.

"We have developed a technology that goes well beyond the mouse and mechanical keyboard," Elias says of the iGesture product that is being marketed through their FingerWorks company.

The FingerWorks name fits because the technology uses a touch pad and a range of finger motions to communicate commands and keys to the computer. To open a file, you rotate your hand as if opening a jar; to zoom or de-zoom, you expand or contract your hand.

Elias says the communication power of their system is "thousands of times greater" than that of a mouse, which uses just a single moving point as the main input. Using this new technology, two human hands provide 10 points of contact, with a wide range of motion for each, thus providing thousands of different patterns, each of which can mean something different to the computer.

While much about the computer has changed over the last three decades--greater power, faster speeds, more memory--what has not changed is the user interface.

"I believe we are on the verge of changing the way people interact with computers," Elias says. "Imagine trying to communicate with another human being using just a mouse and a keyboard. It works, but it is slow and tedious. This is not just a little step in improving the mouse, this is the first step in a new way of communicating with the computer through gestures and the movements of your hands. This is, after all, one of the ways humans interact."

Elias said he could envision in the next 10 years "a very complex gestural language between man and machine."

The system is a multi-touch, zero force technology, Elias said, meaning the gestures and movements use all the fingers in a light and subtle manner. Because of that, the system has a second major advantage over the mouse and mechanical keyboard because it can greatly reduce stress injuries such as tendonitis and carpal tunnel syndrome attributed to traditional computer work.

Detective work leads to prized invitation

Rishi Khan, at the time a University of Delaware undergraduate who is now pursuing a doctorate in UD's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, was instrumental in unlocking the twisted programming secrets of the Melissa virus, which in 1999 was considered the most contagious computer virus that had yet been concocted.

Khan was cruising the Internet one evening when he logged onto an antivirus newsgroup site and spotted a message from cybersleuth Richard Smith, president of Phar Lap Software of Cambridge, Mass.

Smith, with assistance from a Swedish researcher, was investigating similarities between Melissa and other viruses created by a computer vandal using the name VicodinES, which is a type of narcotic painkiller. On the web, he asked fellow programmers for help in solving the mystery.

Then a senior majoring in computer engineering, Khan went straight to work, deciphering Melissa's code and comparing it with various other viruses. Soon, he learned that Melissa was extremely similar to the Shiver virus, created by a vandal known as ALT-F11. Khan's persistent research made it possible to better understand the Melissa virus and eventually led to the arrest of a New Jersey man.

Today, Khan is putting his talents to use in the increasingly important field of bioinformatics.

In 2002, Khan was recognized through an invitation to be a member of the United States delegation to the 52nd meeting of Nobel Laureates in Lindau, Germany. He was one of just 36 American students and 200 young researchers worldwide selected to attend the event.