[ih] A personal note on the passing of Dave Farber

[touch at strayalpha.com]

Hi, all,

I too am sad to hear of the recent passing of Dave Farber.

Dave was my PhD advisor at UPenn. I was introduced to him by Dave Sincoskie, one of Dave’s PhD “F-Troup”* members, when I was his summer intern at Bellcore in 1987. I interviewed with Dave while he was faculty at UDel and joined him as he shifted schools in June 1988. Throughout his storied academic career, he was perhaps THE exception to the rule “most PhD advisors have PhDs”. He carried both an appreciation for fundamentals and a bent towards the pragmatic that I particularly appreciated.

While at Penn, I met other members of F-Troup – Marshall Rose (reviewing his SNMP book), Guru Parulkar, Gary Delp (finishing his thesis at Udel), and Ron Minnich (who transferred to finish at UPenn), as well as second-generation member James Sterbenz (Guru’s advisee). That continued my first full-time job with Jon Postel, and later Paul Mockapetris, both while at USC/ISI. It is a small group in which I am a particularly proud member.

Dave travelled so frequently that his students often computed his “average altitude” based on his nearly back-to-back flights. He gave me the unique opportunity to pursue my own idea (based on a conversation we had on a drive from Philly to DC), supporting my soliciting support from DARPA and representing it directly at PI meetings. Everyone in F-Troup knew advisor meetings were a challenge, more often than not happening during the walk between other events. We often pondered whether Dave made us independent or whether only an independent student would have sought him out - and stayed.

We kept in contact through emails and occasional visits, including his famous “Interesting People” email list, where I was both an avid reader and occasional contributor, and which inspired the creation of this (Internet History) list. For my students, I created an F-Troop clone at USC called T-Troup, as did other first and second-generation advisees at their schools. Occasionally, Dave and I had an opportunity to collaborate, most recently on a talk presented just as COVID arrived on “Rebooting the Internet”. When we weren’t collaborating, we were commiserating – about the state of network research, the state of its funding support, and numerous other issues.

Although I will miss him, I sincerely appreciate the opportunities he presented and his inspiration, and I value the times our ships crossed. Whether in academia or not, I hope each of us aspires to such a noble legacy.

With deepest regards, thanks for everything, Dave.

Joe

F-Troup PhD graduate, UPenn 1992

(* F-Troup was a deliberate misspelling of the TV show “F-Troop”)

—
Dr. Joe Touch, temporal epistemologist
www.strayalpha.com