Frank Kuo, who put ALOHAnet's uncoordinated radio channel online in 1971, has died at 91

Random access is a rule about who asks permission to transmit. In ALOHAnet, stations shared a single ultrahigh-frequency channel with no central coordination, and IEEE Spectrum credits Kuo with pioneering that concept ^[8]. The network moved data between computers on separate Hawaiian islands over radio waves instead of cables ^[7]. Spectrum goes further and says random access led to the packet-switching principles that underpin modern Wi-Fi and mobile networks ^[9].

The same obituary column records the opposite design choice. Muhammad Rezaul Karim joined Bell Labs in 1972 and worked in its mobile telecommunications laboratory on one of the earliest cellular networks ^[19]. His team helped build the Bell Labs logic that controlled the cellular system ^[20]. Illinois Bell petitioned the US Federal Communications Commission in 1975, the FCC authorized the project in March 1977, and Bell Labs and Illinois Bell deployed the Advanced Mobile Phone Service across Chicago the following year, with the switching office in Oak Park ^[21][22][2]. The first test used about 100 mobile phones ^[23]. The 1979 test involved 2,500 users ^[24]. That is 25 times as many handsets inside a year, on a system where a controller assigned the channel ^[1].

What the obituary does not carry is the transfer. It says ALOHAnet "became the foundation for modern networks" and inspired Robert Metcalfe a couple of years later ^[9][4], without saying which parts of the protocol he took into a design for coaxial cable, or what he had to change. Spectrum also names Norman Abramson, an IEEE Life Fellow, as the colleague who developed ALOHAnet with Kuo between 1968 and 1971, and it does not divide the work further or say anything about the rest of the team ^[6][26].

ALOHAnet came in the middle of Kuo's career. He finished his PhD in electrical engineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 1960 and joined Bell Labs at Murray Hill, then left after six years for a professorship at the University of Hawaii ^[10][11], roughly two years before the ALOHAnet work started ^[4]. His textbook Computer Communication Networks, published in 1972, was one of the earliest on the subject ^[12]. He spent 1975 to 1977 at the Pentagon as director of information systems in the defense secretary's office, overseeing computer communications used in command, control and intelligence programs ^[13].

He joined SRI International in Menlo Park in 1982 and was a consulting professor in Stanford's electrical engineering department ^[14]. As a UNESCO lecturer in Beijing in 1994 he helped Peking University, Tsinghua University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences connect to the Internet ^[15]. With Tsinghua he worked on CERNET, China's first nationwide education and research computer network, managed by the Chinese Ministry of Education ^[16]. In the mid-1990s he helped found General Wireless Communications, a developer of mobile phone messaging services and games later renamed Mtone Wireless ^[17].