Farber was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, on April 17, 1934. From an early age, encouraged by his father, Farber tinkered with electronics, building radio sets from kits. He graduated from the
Stevens Institute of Technology with a B.E. degree in electrical engineering in 1956 and a M.S. degree in mathematics in 1961. He then began an 11-year career at
Bell Laboratories, where he helped design the first electronic switching system (
ESS-1) and the
SNOBOL programming languages. He subsequently held industry positions at the
Rand Corporation and
Scientific Data Systems, followed by academic positions at the
University of California, Irvine, the
University of Delaware, and
Carnegie Mellon University. He was awarded an honorary doctorate in engineering from the Stevens Institute in 1999. In 2018, he moved to Japan to become Distinguished Professor at
Keio University and Co-Director of the Keio Cyber Civilization Research Center (CCRC). He was a founding editor of ICANNWatch. He served on the board of advisers of Context Relevant and The Liquid Information Company. He was one of the founding board members of the
Internet Systems Consortium, and had served on that board since 1994. Farber died in Tokyo from heart failure on February 7, 2026, at the age of 91. At the time of his death, Farber was employed as a professor at Keio University. ==Honors and community service==