Professor David J. Farber's career has been focused on the understanding of and the development of technology in the computer and communications area. He started in 1956 with a BS in General Engineering from Stevens Institute of Technology. He started work at Bell Telephone Laboratories, helping to design the world's first electronic switching system which was later installed at Morris, Illinois. This system was the analogue of the ENIAC for today's computer-based telephone systems. He later went on to do pioneering work in programming languages, resulting in the SNOBOL programming language, which is a predecessor of many of today's pattern-match capable languages such as the AWK language and the UNIX Shell command interpreter. After a period at the RAND Corp, he left industry to join the University of California at Irvine (UCI) as a faculty member. At UCI he was responsible for the conceptualization of the first operational distributed computer system sponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation -- the DCS system which was the first use of client-server ideas, along with the first micro kernel and the first ring-type Local Area Network. At the University of Delaware, Prof. Farber collaborated in the creation and operation of CSNET and the NREN as well as co-authoring the proposal which resulted in the U.S. Gigabit Testbeds. At the University of Pennsylvania, Prof. Farber holds The Alfred Fitler Moore Chair of Telecommunication Systems. Prof. Farber serves on many industrial and government advisory committees, and is a Fellow of the IEEE. He serves on the Board of Trustees of both the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Internet Society.