Sharla Boehm

Sharla Boehm (née Perrine, December 4, 1929 – April 14, 2023) was an American computer scientist who carried out pioneering work in packet switching while working for the RAND Corporation in the 1960s.

Biography
Born in Seattle on December 4, 1929, Sharla Perrine moved to Santa Monica three years later. After graduating in mathematics from the University of California, Los Angeles, she taught mathematics and science in Santa Monica schools. She began to work at RAND in 1959 where she met her husband to be, Barry Boehm.

In 1964, together with her colleague Paul Baran, she published a paper titled "On Distributed Communications: II. Digital Simulation of Hot-Potato Routing in a Broadband Distributed Communications Network". As her name appears first in the original paper, she seems to have been the one who was behind the simulation programmed in Fortran, showing that packet switching (or "hot-potato routing" as it was called) could indeed work.

In RAND and the Information Evolution, Baran describes how Boehm carried out various simulations under different conditions, demonstrating that the protocol routed traffic efficiently. In particular, it was discovered that if half the network was destroyed, the remainder reorganized and began routing again in less than a second.

In a 1996 paper on "An Early Application Generator and Other Recollections", Barry Boehm notes that Sharla Boehm "had developed the original packet-switched network simulation with Paul Baran", a development which led him to become involved in the pioneering ARPAnet Working Group.

Sharla Boehm died in Santa Monica on April 14, 2023, at the age of 93.