Don Cone

Virgil Donald Cone (October 17, 1926 – April 7, 2011) was a technician and later researcher at SRI International who developed and ran the Packet Radio Van that was used in the first ARPANET internetworked transmission.

[1] Cone served in the United States Army Air Corps for about a year near the end of World War II; he broke his wrist during basic training and was hospitalized in Coral Gables, Florida, and was reassigned as a medical photographer in that hospital.

[1] Around 1950, Don joined the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California as a technician in order to better financially support his family.

In that lab, he did a significant amount of international travelling to build equipment and perform antenna measurements.

[1] As part of the DARPA project to connect the disparate computers at its various contractors, there was a push to build a mobile packet radio 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 - connecting different communications protocols via the internet protocol suite.