Sharla (Perrine) Boehm '51

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Sharla (Perrine) Boehm '51 passed away on April 13 at age 93. She was predeceased by her husband, Barry M.A. '61, Ph.D. '64; both earned their UCLA degrees in mathematics. Sharla also earned her teaching credential from UCLA and joined the Gold Shield Alumnae network in 1957.

According to her Wikipedia page, Boehm carried out pioneering work in packet switching in the 1960s while working at RAND Corporation, where she met her future husband. She was primarily responsible for the simulation, which she programmed in Fortran.

According to Wikipedia, 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 Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the technical foundation of the Internet.