David J. Farber
American computer scientist (1934–2026)
David Jack Farber (April 17, 1934 – February 7, 2026) was an American professor of computer science, noted for his major contributions to programming languages and computer networking and was a distinguished professor and co-director of Cyber Civilization Research Center at Keio University in Japan.
Farber was widely known as a mentor who maintained a global list of contacts in the high technology field, often connecting people with problems that needed solving.
Life and career
Farber was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, on April 17, 1934. From an early age, encouraged by his father, Farber tinkered with electronics, building radio sets from kits. He graduated from the Stevens Institute of Technology with a B.E. degree in electrical engineering in 1956 and a M.S. degree in mathematics in 1961. He then began an 11-year career at Bell Laboratories, where he helped design the first electronic switching system (ESS-1) and the SNOBOL programming languages. He subsequently held industry positions at the Rand Corporation and Scientific Data Systems, followed by academic positions at the University of California, Irvine, the University of Delaware, and Carnegie Mellon University. He was awarded an honorary doctorate in engineering from the Stevens Institute in 1999.
At Irvine his research work was focused on creating the world's first operational distributed computer system. While a member of the electrical engineering department of the University of Delaware, he helped conceive and organize the major American research networks CSNET, NSFNet, and the National Research and Education Network (NREN).
“David J. Farber” enters the record as american computer scientist (1934–2026). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what David, Farber and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5235420. VIAF identifies the subject as 104121802. The Library of Congress control number is n79103243. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1934, 2026, 1956 and 1961.
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This entry incorporates text from “David J. Farber” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.