Virgil Donald Cone (October 17, 1926 – April 7, 2011) was a technician and later researcher at

SRI International SRI International (SRI) is a nonprofit organization, nonprofit scientific research, scientific research institute and organization headquartered in Menlo Park, California, United States. It was established in 1946 by trustees of Stanford Univer ...

who developed and ran the Packet Radio Van that was used in the first

ARPANET The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first computer networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the tec ...

internetworked transmission.

Early life and education

Cone dedicated his early life to the study of photography, in particular at the Fred Archer School of Photography under

Fred R. Archer Fred Robert Archer (December 3, 1889 – April 27, 1963), was an American photographer who collaborated with Ansel Adams to create the Zone System. He was a portrait photographer, specializing early in his career in portraits of Hollywood mov ...

, who was a partner of

Ansel Adams Ansel Easton Adams (February 20, 1902 – April 22, 1984) was an American landscape photographer and environmentalist known for his Monochrome photography, black-and-white images of the American West. He helped found Group f/64, an association ...

. Cone served in the

United States Army Air Corps The United States Army Air Corps (USAAC) was the aerial warfare service component of the United States Army between 1926 and 1941. After World War I, as early aviation became an increasingly important part of modern warfare, a philosophical ri ...

for about a year near the end of

World War II World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...

; he broke his wrist during basic training and was hospitalized in

Coral Gables, Florida Coral Gables is a city in Miami-Dade County, Florida, United States. The city is part of the Miami metropolitan area of South Florida and is located southwest of Greater Downtown Miami, Downtown Miami. As of the 2020 United States census, 2020 ...

, and was reassigned as a medical photographer in that hospital. After he was discharged, he worked for a commercial photographer in

Pasadena, California Pasadena ( ) is a city in Los Angeles County, California, United States, northeast of downtown Los Angeles. It is the most populous city and the primary cultural center of the San Gabriel Valley. Old Pasadena is the city's original commerci ...

Early career

Around 1950, Don joined the

Jet Propulsion Laboratory The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is a Federally funded research and development centers, federally funded research and development center (FFRDC) in La Cañada Flintridge, California, Crescenta Valley, United States. Founded in 1936 by Cali ...

in Pasadena, California as a technician in order to better financially support his family. In 1954, Don moved to Palo Alto to work as a technician for

SRI Shri (; , ) is a Sanskrit term denoting resplendence, wealth and prosperity, primarily used as an honorific. The word is widely used in South and Southeast Asian languages such as Assamese, Meitei ( Manipuri), Marathi, Malay (including In ...

; he initially worked in the Poulter Laboratory performing high-speed photography to support research into the use of explosives in oil exploration. He moved to the Communication and Propagation Lab, which split in 1961; he stayed in communications. In that lab, he did a significant amount of international travelling to build equipment and perform antenna measurements.

Later career

As part of the

DARPA The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. Originally known as the Adva ...

project to connect the disparate computers at its various contractors, there was a push to build a mobile

packet radio In digital radio, packet radio is the application of packet switching techniques to digital radio communications. Packet radio uses a packet switching Communication protocol, protocol as opposed to circuit switching or message switching protocols ...

laboratory to house a node of the early network, partly to simulate the needs of in-the-field military to connect to the network, and partly to test

internetworking Internetworking is the practice of interconnecting multiple computer networks. Typically, this enables any pair of hosts in the connected networks to exchange messages irrespective of their hardware-level networking technology. The resulting sys ...

- connecting different communications protocols via the

internet protocol suite The Internet protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, is a framework for organizing the communication protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks according to functional criteria. The foundational protocols in the suite are ...

. The Packet Radio Van, designed by Don Cone, was a large GMC van and contained all of the equipment needed to be an ARPANET node via packet radio. Other equipment included a shielded generator, a DEC

LSI-11 The PDP–11 is a series of 16-bit minicomputers originally sold by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) from 1970 into the late 1990s, one of a set of products in the Programmed Data Processor (PDP) series. In total, around 600,000 PDP-11s of al ...

16-bit minicomputer, flexible equipment racks, and air conditioning. Due to his contributions around that time, Cone was promoted to Research Engineer. Cone retired from SRI in the early 1990s, and focused on his love of photography; he embraced digital photography when that technology developed. He died of pancreatic and lung cancer on April 7, 2011.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Cone, Don 1926 births 2011 deaths SRI International people