Hey guys! Next time you use Zoom or Skype to speak to your grandmother across the country or login to that video web conference, tip your emoji hat to Dr. Marian Croak, one of the prominent developers of the VoIP (voice over internet protocol) technology that makes that software possible. She holds over 200+ patents for this technology and her innovations in making it accessible for us!
Black History Month: Day 5: Dr. Marian Croak-Developer of ViOP-Technology Used in Zoom
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The Inventor of VoIP - Marian Croak
Written by Kate Vinnedge | Feb 25, 2021 8:00:09 PM
One year after the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that public schools must be desegregated in the landmark, historical case of Brown v. Board of Education, Marian Croak was born.
Thirty years later, while working for AT&T at Bell Labs, she pioneered the technology that is responsible for Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone systems. Without her, VoIP technology could very well be a forgone experiment, culminating with us stuck using classic PBX phone systems.
As a black girl growing up in 60’s New York City, there was very little privilege afforded to Marian Croak, save for her ingenuity, curiosity, and a supportive family. Despite growing up in a time where women, and especially women of color struggled to find acceptance in their goals and ambition, Marian Croak defied the odds, and not for her own personal gain — but rather to reduce the barrier of entry to quality, affordable communication.
ATM VS TCP/IP
Marian graduated with her Ph.D. in quantitative analysis — otherwise known as data science — as well as social psychology from the University of Southern California, and soon after began working for Bell Labs in 1982.
There, Marian first began working on messaging applications, with the task of determining whether various messaging applications could communicate with each other. It’s important to put into perspective how novel this kind of research was at the time — the earliest form of the internet, known as ARPANET, would not come to full fruition until the next year in 1983.
Coincidentally, the technology that would empower ARPANET to eventually morph into the ubiquitous internet as we know it today was the same technology Marian convinced AT&T to utilize for their VoIP system.
AT&T was busy researching how to leverage a technology that could send voice, data, and video digitally, rather than using a standard phone line. Initially, Bell Labs was leaning towards Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) protocol. This method largely works by coding data packets into uniform sizes to send data from one endpoint to the other.
Marian believed in the power of the technology that gave rise to ARPANET, TCP/IP, and convinced AT&T to abandon ATM in favor of TCP/IP, which provides end-to-end communication by specifying how data should be packetized, addressed, transmitted, routed, and received.
TCP/IP uses four abstraction layers send data: the link layer, the internet layer, the transport layer, and the application layer.
While this technology wasn’t fully fledged at the time, Marion’s expertise convinced AT&T to leverage TCP/IP, and the rest is history. Without her involvement, we would not have the technology that allows services like Skype, FaceTime, or VoIP in general to exist.
AFTER VOIP
Marian wasn’t done inventing new ways for us to use technology, however. Over the course of her 32-year career at AT&T, she filed 200 patents, one of which was the technology that allowed for cellphone users to donate money through text messages.
If you’ve ever donated money to a charity or cause through text, you can thank Marian.
Now, Marian works as the Vice President of Engineering at Google, where she most recently is responsible for making sure AI projects are researched ethically, possibly one of the most important projects of her entire career.
There is one thing for certain; the world would be a much less talkative place without the mind of Marian Croak, and for that, we thank her.
The Inventor of VoIP - Marian Croak
I love that your doing this. I had no idea. Thank you for sharing their stories.
Yep my next one will be on how a black man was a key developer of the first computers!
Ayyyye!!! We outchea. It’s just crazy that on a black site we not celebrating more unsung heroes. Same posters that got time to grumble and bytch about gender shyt can’t be found to celebrate the successes of our community.
feelosofer
#ninergang
Wow, the more you know!!! Great info about this sister. Tech Queen.
humminbird
Veteran
wow
amazing story
amazing story
Yapdatfool
Superstar
Brother who worked for HP, right?
Am I tripping or wasn't there a black man (posted on here years ago) who helped innovate the idea of selling ip addresses to the masses?
I saw a YouTube vid years ago about a Brother who worked for one of those big computer companies out there in California. Might be the dude you’re talking about. I forgot what his idea was but it eventually led to all of us being able to have home computers today.
Nobody at his company would listen to his idea so he was at a tech conference in Vegas his company sent him to and he set up a booth to show his idea and the line of interested people was long as hell.
People from his company saw what was going on and finally woke the fukk up. They gave that man something like $2500 and told him to have his ass in the office bright and early on Monday, where they proceeded to take his idea and make multi-billions.