Franklin H. Westervelt

ARPANET program manager Larry Roberts asked Frank to explore the questions of message size and contents for the ARPANET, and to write a position paper on the intercomputer communication protocol including “conventions for character and block transmission, error checking and re transmission, and computer and user identification.

"[6] Frank also served as a representative to the statewide Michigan Inter-university Committee on Information Systems (MICIS) and was involved in establishing the MERIT Computer Network.

[7] Fred Gibbons, a successful entrepreneur and venture capitalist, said that the University of Michigan College of Engineering, where he earned his BSE and MSE degrees in the late 1960s and early 1970s when computers were unknown or a novelty in most classrooms and the school didn’t even offer a formal computer major, "... was at the forefront of technology that turned out to be very important to me personally, and I got early exposure to it from a couple of great guys–professors Frank Westervelt and Bernard Galler.

"Bartels, Arden, and Westervelt," Norman has said, "were a team that we took great care should not be broken up or induced to leave the University.

Westervelt, the hardware expert, Arden, brilliant in software and logic, and Bartels orchestrating their progress-these three put together a superb timesharing computer system.