Howard Frank was an academic from 1965, the year he finished his PhD, to 1968 before working for the
OEP as a consultant. He then went on to found the Network Analysis Corporation a year later along with a business associate. After selling NAC to Contel Corporation, he created Network Management Incorporated in 1986. He left his corporate career in 1990 to work at
DARPA where he was the founding director of Defense Department's Advanced Information Technology Services Joint Program. In 1997 he was appointed as dean of
Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland, College Park where he worked until he retired in 2015.
Thesis and continuation of Paul Baran's work His thesis: "Optimum Locations on a Graph with Probabilistic Demands" This insight allowed for the operations detailed in Paul Baran's work to be cut down significantly from the thousands of hours of simulation time originally necessary. Howard Frank explained in one of his interview how this kind of insight perfectly displays his talent: "My talent is that I'm a synthesist. I'm not an original creator of advanced mathematics. Never have been, but as a synthesist, I can take ideas from different fields and put them together, and I could create new things out of that, and because of that, nobody else was working in the field, I was cream skimming. I could say: "What about this?" And nobody would have thought about it yet. Nobody would have worked on it, so I worked on it."
NAC and ARPA After finishing his project at the OEP, in 1969, Howard Frank and Dave Rosenbaum created the Network Analysis Corporation in an effort to solve similar issues than the ones encountered while working at the OEP. Dr Frank was contacted by
Lawrence Roberts to work on the topological design of the
ARPANET. The NAC, with Howard as its principal investigator on this project, worked on building models with the
Control Data 6600 to analyze the network and find ways to optimize it. They analyzed the network and designed upcoming changes and expansions of the network. The NAC also modeled the economics of
packet switching on data and voice in a bid to convince companies to adopt this new technology. Howard attended one meeting where he and Lawrence Roberts displayed the advantages of packet switching to AT&T in telephone networks to no avail. The NAC also worked with
DARPA on a network based on the
ARPANET for military use. The analysis they ran and designs they submitted led to the creation of the project
AUTODIN II which never was realized. It was instead replaced by the
Defense Data Network which instead of being separated from ARPANET like AUTODIN, used ARPANET. The Defense Data Network relied on the work done by the NAC for AUTODIN II. ==Personal life==