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Donald Davies

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This article is about Donald Davies, the computer scientist. For other uses, see Donald Davies (disambiguation).

Donald Watts Davies
CBE FRS
Born(1924-06-07)7 June 1924
Treorchy, Glamorgan, Wales
Died28 May 2000(2000-05-28) (aged 75)
Esher, Surrey, England
Alma materImperial College
Known forPacket switching
AwardsCBE
FRS
Distinguished Fellow, BCS
Scientific career
FieldsComputer science
InstitutionsNational Physical Laboratory

Donald Watts Davies, CBE FRS (7 June 1924 – 28 May 2000) was a Welsh computer scientist and Internet pioneer who was employed at the UK National Physical Laboratory (NPL).

During 1965-67 he invented modern data communications, including packet switching, high-speed routers, layered communication protocols, hierarchical computer networks and the essence of the end-to-end principle, concepts that are used today in computer networks worldwide. He envisioned, in 1966, that there would be a "single network" for data and telephone communications. Davies proposed and studied a commercial national data network in the United Kingdom and designed and built the first implementation of packet switching in the local-area NPL network in 1966-69 to demonstrate the technology. Many of the wide-area packet-switched networks built in the late 1960s and 1970s were similar "in nearly all respects" to his original 1965 design. Davies' work influenced the ARPANET in the United States and the CYCLADES project in France, and was key to the development of the data communications technology used in Internet, which is a network of networks.

Davies' work was independent of the work of Paul Baran in the United States who had some similar ideas in the early 1960s, and who also provided input to the ARPANET project, after his work was highlighted by Davies' team.

Early life

[edit]

Davies was born in Treorchy in the Rhondda Valley, Wales. His father, a clerk at a coalmine, died a few months later, and his mother took Donald and his twin sister back to her home town of Portsmouth, where he went to school.[1] He attended the Southern Grammar School for Boys.[2]

He received a BSc degree in physics (1943) at Imperial College London, and then joined the war effort working as an assistant to Klaus Fuchs[1] on the nuclear weapons Tube Alloys project at Birmingham University.[3] He then returned to Imperial taking a first class degree in mathematics (1947); he was also awarded the Lubbock memorial Prize as the outstanding mathematician of his year.[2]

In 1955, he married Diane Burton; they had a daughter and two sons.[4]

Career history

[edit]

National Physical Laboratory

[edit]

From 1947, he worked at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) at Teddington, just outside London, where Alan Turing was designing the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) computer. It is said that Davies spotted mistakes in Turing's seminal 1936 paper On Computable Numbers, much to Turing's annoyance. These were perhaps some of the first "programming" bugs in existence, even if they were for a theoretical computer, the universal Turing machine. The ACE project was overambitious and floundered, leading to Turing's departure.[3] Davies took over the project and concentrated on delivering the less ambitious Pilot ACE computer, which first worked in May 1950. A commercial spin-off, DEUCE was manufactured by English Electric Computers and became one of the best-selling machines of the 1950s.[3]

Davies also worked on applications of traffic simulation and machine translation. In the early 1960s, he worked on government technology initiatives designed to stimulate the British computer industry.

Packet switching

[edit]
Further information: NPL network

In 1965, Davies became interested in data communications following a seminar he gave at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[5][6] He saw that a significant problem with the new time-sharing computer systems was the cost of keeping a phone connection open for each user.[5] Davies' key insight came in the realisation that computer network traffic was inherently "bursty" in nature with periods of silence, compared with relatively constant telephone traffic.[7][3] He applied the principle of time-sharing to the data communications line as well as the computer to invent the concept of what he called packet switching.[3][8] Davies forecast today's "killer app" for his new communication service:[9]

The greatest traffic could only come if the public used this means for everyday purposes such as shopping... People sending enquiries and placing orders for goods of all kinds will make up a large section of the traffic... Business use of the telephone may be reduced by the growth of the kind of service we contemplate.

— Donald Davies (1965)

Davies proposed dividing computer messages into very "short messages in fixed format" that are routed independently across a network, with differing routes allowed for related packets, which are reassembled at the destination.[10] Davies used the word "packet" after consulting with a linguist because it was capable of being translated into languages other than English without compromise.[11]

The following year, he returned to work at the NPL, where he became Superintendent of the Computer Science Division and transformed its computing activity.[12] He designed and proposed a commercial national data network based on packet switching in his 1966 Proposal for the Development of a National Communications Service for On-line Data Processing.[10] This work was the first to describe the concept of high-speed "switching nodes", today known as routers as well as "interface computers".[6][13] Davies applied queueing theory to show that "there is an ample margin between the estimated performance of the [packet-switched] system and the stated requirement" in terms of a satisfactory response time for a human user.[10] This addressed a key question about the viability of computer networking.[14] In this paper, he predicted there would be a "single network" for data and telephone communications:[10]

Computer developments in the distant future might result in one type of network being able to carry speech and digital messages efficiently.

— Donald Davies (1966)

Davies and his team were the first to write communication protocols in a modern data-commutation context in an April 1967 memorandum A Protocol for Use in the NPL Data Communications Network written by Roger Scantlebury and Keith Bartlett.[15][16]

His work on packet switching, presented by Scantlebury, initially caught the attention of the developers of the ARPANET, a U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) network, at the Symposium on Operating Systems Principles in October 1967.[17] The proposed network design was based on a hierarchical structure, with "local networks" communicating with a "high level network".[18] To deal with packet permutations (due to dynamically updated route preferences) and datagram losses (unavoidable when fast sources send to a slow destinations), he assumed that "all users of the network will provide themselves with some kind of error control",[19] thus inventing what came to be known as the end-to-end principle. In Scantlebury's report following the conference, he noted "It would appear that the ideas in the NPL paper at the moment are more advanced than any proposed in the USA".[20][21] Larry Roberts, of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the United States Department of Defense (DoD), applied Davies' concepts of packet switching for the ARPANET, which went on to become a predecessor to the Internet.[2][22][23][24]

In July 1968, NPL put on a demonstration of real and simulated networks at an event organised by the Real Time Club at the Royal Festival Hall in London.[8] Davies first presented his own ideas on packet switching at a conference in Edinburgh on 5 August 1968.[25][26] In 1969, Davies was invited to Japan to lecture on packet switching. He gave a series of nine three-hour lectures, concluding with an intense discussion with around 80 people.[2]

During 1968-9,[16][27] Davies directed the construction of the network, elements of which went live in early 1969,[28][29] the first implementation of packet switching in the world.[30][31] The local-area Mark I NPL network, became fully operational in January 1970.[29] It was upgraded to the Mark II in 1973 with a layered protocol architecture, and remained in operation until 1986.[16] The NPL team also carried out simulation work on packet networks, studying datagrams and network congestion in wide-area networks of a scale to facilitate data communications across the United Kingdom.[3][29][32][33] These early years of computer resource sharing were documented in the 1972 film Computer Networks: The Heralds of Resource Sharing. Davies' original ideas influenced other research around the world,[29][34] including Louis Pouzin's CYCLADES project in France.[35]

In a 1978 special edition of the Proceedings of the IEEE on packet switching, Bob Kahn, the guest editor, quoted Davies' reflections on ten years of experience with packet communication networks:[36]

... there are three factors, above all, which critically affect the quality of the network. The most critical factor is our ability to design man-machine interfaces which are convenient and natural for most people to use. A second factor of some importance is the high reliability and availability of the services. They cannot become an integral part of industry and commerce unless they can be utterly reliable in the way we have come to expect of the traditional telecommunication media. A third requirement is an overall system design which allows for adaptability to changes in the system as well as to new user requirements.

— Donald Davies (1978)

Internetworking

[edit]

Davies, along with Derek Barber, his deputy, and Roger Scantlebury, conducted research into protocols for internetworking. They participated in the International Network Working Group from 1972, initially chaired by Vint Cerf and later by Barber.[37][38][39][40] Davies and Scantlebury were acknowledged by Cerf and Bob Kahn in their seminal 1974 paper on internetworking, A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication.[41][42]

Davies and Barber published Communication networks for computers in 1973.[43] They spoke at the Data Communications Symposium in 1975 about the "battle for access standards" between datagrams and virtual circuits, with Barber saying the "lack of standard access interfaces for emerging public packet-switched communication networks is creating 'some kind of monster' for users".[44]

Internetworking experiments at NPL under Davies included connecting with the European Informatics Network (EIN) by translating between two different host protocols and connecting with the Post Office Experimental Packet Switched Service (EPSS) using a common host protocol in both networks. Their research confirmed establishing a common host protocol would be more reliable and efficient than translating between different host protocols using a gateway.[45] Davies published Computer networks and their protocols in 1979, in which he notes:[46]

The problems of routing in interconnected networks have received limited attention in the literature; notable papers are those by Cerf and Kahn and, more recently, Sunshine. ... The gateway nodes must be provided with an adequate packet buffer pool to cater for the likely level of inter-network traffic. Cerf and Kahn suggest that message reassembly should not take place at gateways; this implies that packet ordering need not be maintained if adaptive routing disrupts packet order. If fragmentation of packets is necessary because of different network packet size limits, Cerf and Kahn maintain that the only logical place to locate the reconstruction process is in the destination host (this is because the last network entered may have the least packet size limit, so that the last gateway has to fragment packets). This philosophy goes against the widely held view that packet networks should deliver a data stream exactly equivalent to the received data stream.

— Donald Davies (1979)

For a long period of time, the network engineering community was polarized over the implementation of competing protocol suites, a debate commonly called the Protocol Wars. It was unclear which type of protocol would result in the best and most robust computer networks.[47]

Computer network security

[edit]

Davies relinquished his management responsibilities in 1979 to return to research. He became particularly interested in computer network security and his research on cryptography led to a number of patents, including methods for providing secure communication to enable the use of smart cards.[4][48]

He retired from NPL in 1984, becoming a leading consultant on data security to the banking industry and publishing a book on the topic that year.[3][4] Together with David O. Clayden, he designed the Message Authenticator Algorithm (MAA) in 1983, one of the first message authentication code algorithms to gain widespread acceptance. It was adopted as international standard ISO 8731-2 in 1987.[2]

Later career

[edit]

In 1987, Davies became a visiting professor at Royal Holloway and Bedford New College.[49]

Epilogue

[edit]

Unbeknown to Davies at first, Paul Baran of the RAND Corporation in the United States had also worked on a similar concept in the early 1960s, although designed for voice communication using low-cost electronics without communication protocols.[50][51][52] When Davies became aware of Baran's work in 1966 he acknowledged that they both had equally discovered the concept of packet switching and Davies and his team referenced Baran's earlier published work.[53][54][55][56]

Baran was happy to acknowledge that Davies had come up with the same idea as him independently. In an email to Davies, he wrote:[53]

You and I share a common view of what packet switching is all about, since you and I independently came up with the same ingredients. ... and [you were] the first to reduce it to practice.

— Paul Baran (2000)

Leonard Kleinrock, a contemporary working on analysing message delays using queueing theory, developed a mathematical model for the operation of message switching networks in his PhD thesis during 1961-2, published as a book in 1964.[57] However, Kleinrock's later claim to have developed the theoretical basis of packet switching networks is disputed by other Internet pioneers,[58][59][60][61] including by Robert Taylor,[62] Baran[63] and Davies.[64][41]

Legacy

[edit]

Donald Davies and Paul Baran are recognized by historians and the U.S. National Inventors Hall of Fame for independently inventing the concept of digital packet switching used in modern computer networking including the Internet.[65][66]

Larry Roberts said the computer networks built in the 1970s were similar "in nearly all respects" to Davies' original 1965 design.[67] Davies' work on data communications and computer network design has been described as the "cornerstone" technology used in the development of the Internet, which is a global system of connected computer networks (a network of networks).[68][49][69][70][71]

Awards and honours

[edit]

Davies was appointed a Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society (BCS) in 1975 and was made a CBE in 1983, and later a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1987.[22][3]

He received the John Player Award from the BCS in 1974.[72] and was awarded a medal by the John von Neumann Computer Society in Hungary in 1985.[73]

In 2000, Davies shared the inaugural IEEE Internet Award.[74] In 2007, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame,[75] and in 2012 Davies was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame by the Internet Society.[76]

Davies received a lifetime achievement award in 2001 for his research into secure communications for smart cards.[77][78]

NPL sponsors a gallery, opened in 2009, about the development of packet switching and "Technology of the Internet" at The National Museum of Computing.[79]

A blue plaque commemorating Davies was unveiled in Treorchy in July 2013.[80][81]

Family

[edit]

Davies was survived by his wife Diane, a daughter, two sons and four grandchildren.[82]

See also

[edit]

Books

[edit]
  • Davies, Donald Watts (1963), Digital Techniques, Electronic User Series, Blackie & Son
  • Davies, Donald Watts; Barber, Derek L. A. (1973), Communication networks for computers, Computing and Information Processing, John Wiley & Sons, ISBN 9780471198741
  • Davies, Donald Watts (1979), Computer networks and their protocols, Computing and Information Processing, John Wiley & Sons, ISBN 9780471997504 with W. Price, D. Barber, C. Solomonides
  • Davies, D. W.; Price, W. L. (1984), Security for computer networks: an introduction to data security in teleprocessing and electronic funds transfer, New York: John Wiley & Sons, ISBN 978-0471921370

References

[edit]
  1. ^ a b The History of Computing Project – Donald Davies Biography
  2. ^ a b c d e Needham, R. M. (2002). "Donald Watts Davies, C.B.E. 7 June 1924 – 28 May 2000". Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. 48: 87–96. doi:10.1098/rsbm.2002.0006. S2CID 72835589. The 1967 Gatlinburg paper was influential on the development of ARPAnet, which might otherwise have been built with less extensible technology. ... Davies was invited to Japan to lecture on packet switching.
  3. ^ a b c d e f g h Cambell-Kelly, Martin (Autumn 2008). "Pioneer Profiles: Donald Davies". Computer Resurrection (44). ISSN 0958-7403.
  4. ^ a b c "Donald Davies Obituary", The Guardian, 2 June 2000
  5. ^ a b Roberts, Lawrence G. (November 1978). "The evolution of packet switching" (PDF). Proceedings of the IEEE. 66 (11): 1307–13. doi:10.1109/PROC.1978.11141. S2CID 26876676.
  6. ^ a b Roberts, Dr. Lawrence G. (May 1995). "The ARPANET & Computer Networks". Archived from the original on 24 March 2016. Retrieved 13 April 2016.
  7. ^ Dettmer, R. (16 July 1998). "Almost an Accident". IEE Review. 44 (4): 169–172. doi:10.1049/ir:19980411. ISSN 0953-5683.
  8. ^ a b Barber, Derek (Spring 1993). "The Origins of Packet Switching". The Bulletin of the Computer Conservation Society (5). ISSN 0958-7403. Retrieved 6 September 2017.
  9. ^ Edmondson-Yurkanan, Chris (2007). "SIGCOMM's archaeological journey into networking's past". Communications of the ACM. 50 (5): 63–68. doi:10.1145/1230819.1230840. ISSN 0001-0782.
  10. ^ a b c d Davies, D. W. (1966), Proposal for a Digital Communication Network (PDF), National Physical Laboratory
  11. ^ Harris, p. 6
  12. ^ Scantlebury, Roger; Wilkinson, Peter; Barber, Derek (2001). NPL, Packet Switching and the Internet. Symposium of the Institution of Analysts & Programmers 2001. Archived from the original on 7 August 2003. Retrieved 13 June 2024. The system first went 'live' early in 1969
  13. ^ Pelkey, James (2007). Entrepreneurial Capitalism & Innovation: A History of Computer Communications 1968 - 1988. Retrieved 18 February 2020. paper dated June 1966 ... introduced the concept of an "interface computer" to sit between the user equipment and the packet network.
  14. ^ Heart, F.; McKenzie, A.; McQuillian, J.; Walden, D. (4 January 1978). Arpanet Completion Report (PDF) (Technical report). Burlington, MA: Bolt, Beranek and Newman. pp. III-40-1
  15. ^ Naughton, John (24 September 2015). A Brief History of the Future. Orion. p. 292. ISBN 978-1-4746-0277-8.
  16. ^ a b c Campbell-Kelly, Martin (1987). "Data Communications at the National Physical Laboratory (1965-1975)". Annals of the History of Computing. 9 (3/4): 221–247. doi:10.1109/MAHC.1987.10023. S2CID 8172150.
  17. ^ Isaacson, Walter (2014). The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution. Simon & Schuster. p. 237. ISBN 9781476708690.
  18. ^ A History of the ARPANET: The First Decade (PDF) (Report). Bolt, Beranek & Newman Inc. 1 April 1981. pp. 53 of 183 (III-11 on the printed copy). Archived from the original on 1 December 2012.
  19. ^ Davies, Donald; Bartlett, Keith; Scantlebury, Roger; Wilkinson, Peter (October 1967). A Digital Communication Network for Computers Giving Rapid Response at remote Terminals (PDF). ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles. Archived (PDF) from the original on 10 October 2022. Retrieved 15 September 2020.
  20. ^ J. Gillies, R. Cailliau (2000). How the Web was Born: The Story of the World Wide Web. Oxford University Press. pp. 23–25. ISBN 0192862073.
  21. ^ "Oral-History:Donald Davies & Derek Barber". Retrieved 13 April 2016.
  22. ^ a b "Computer Pioneers - Donald W. Davies". IEEE Computer Society. Retrieved 20 February 2020. The design of the ARPA network (ArpaNet) was entirely changed to adopt this technique.
  23. ^ "Pioneer: Donald Davies", Internet Hall of Fame "America’s Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA), and the ARPANET received his network design enthusiastically and the NPL local network became the first two computer networks in the world using the technique."
  24. ^ Abbate, Jane (2000). Inventing the Internet. MIT Press. p. 38. ISBN 0262261332.
  25. ^ Luke Collins, "Network pioneer remembered", Engineering & Technology, IET, 6 September 2008
  26. ^ Davies, D. W. (August 1968), "The Principles of a data Communication Network for Computers and Remote Peripherals", Information processing 68: proceedings of IFIP Congress 1968, International Federation for Information Processing, North Holland, ISBN 0-7204-2032-6
  27. ^ Scantlebury, R. A.; Wilkinson, P.T. (1974). "The National Physical Laboratory Data Communications Network". Proceedings of the 2nd ICCC 74. pp. 223–228.
  28. ^ Rayner, David; Barber, Derek; Scantlebury, Roger; Wilkinson, Peter (2001). NPL, Packet Switching and the Internet. Symposium of the Institution of Analysts & Programmers 2001. Archived from the original on 7 August 2003. Retrieved 13 June 2024. The system first went 'live' early in 1969
  29. ^ a b c d C. Hempstead; W. Worthington (2005). Encyclopedia of 20th-Century Technology. Routledge. pp. 573–5. ISBN 9781135455514.
  30. ^ John S, Quarterman; Josiah C, Hoskins (1986). "Notable computer networks". Communications of the ACM. 29 (10): 932–971. doi:10.1145/6617.6618. S2CID 25341056. The first packet-switching network was implemented at the National Physical Laboratories in the United Kingdom. It was quickly followed by the ARPANET in 1969.
  31. ^ Haughney Dare-Bryan, Christine (22 June 2023). Computer Freaks (Podcast). Chapter Two: In the Air. Inc. Magazine. 35:55 minutes in. Leonard Kleinrock: Donald Davies ... did make a single node packet switch before ARPA did
  32. ^ Clarke, Peter (1982). Packet and circuit-switched data networks (PDF) (PhD thesis). Department of Electrical Engineering, Imperial College of Science and Technology, University of London. "As well as the packet switched network actually built at NPL for communication between their local computing facilities, some simulation experiments have been performed on larger networks. A summary of this work is reported in [69]. The work was carried out to investigate networks of a size capable of providing data communications facilities to most of the U.K. ... Experiments were then carried out using a method of flow control devised by Davies [70] called 'isarithmic' flow control. ... The simulation work carried out at NPL has, in many respects, been more realistic than most of the ARPA network theoretical studies."
  33. ^ Pelkey, James. "6.3 CYCLADES Network and Louis Pouzin 1971-1972". Entrepreneurial Capitalism and Innovation: A History of Computer Communications 1968-1988. Archived from the original on 17 June 2021. Retrieved 3 February 2020.
  34. ^ Roberts, Dr. Lawrence G. (November 1978). "The Evolution of Packet Switching" (PDF). IEEE Invited Paper. Archived from the original (PDF) on 31 December 2018. Retrieved 10 September 2017. In nearly all respects, Davies' original proposal, developed in late 1965, was similar to the actual networks being built today.
  35. ^ Pelkey, James. "8.3 CYCLADES Network and Louis Pouzin 1971–1972". Entrepreneurial Capitalism and Innovation: A History of Computer Communications 1968–1988.
  36. ^ Kahn, R.E.; Uncapher, K.W.; van Trees, H.L. (1978). "Scanning the issue". Proceedings of the IEEE. 66 (11): 1303–1306. doi:10.1109/PROC.1978.11140. ISSN 0018-9219.
  37. ^ McKenzie, Alexander (2011). "INWG and the Conception of the Internet: An Eyewitness Account". IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. 33 (1): 66–71. doi:10.1109/MAHC.2011.9. ISSN 1934-1547. S2CID 206443072. Perhaps the only historical difference that would have occurred if DARPA had switched to the INWG 96 protocol is that rather than Cerf and Kahn being routinely cited as "fathers of the Internet," maybe Cerf, Scantlebury, Zimmermann, and I would have been.
  38. ^ Andrew L. Russell (30 July 2013). "OSI: The Internet That Wasn't". IEEE Spectrum. Vol. 50, no. 8.
  39. ^ "Smithsonian Oral and Video Histories: Vinton Cerf". National Museum of American History. Smithsonian Institution. 24 April 1990. Retrieved 23 September 2019. Roger Scantlebury was one of the major players. And Donald Davies who ran, at least he was superintendent of the information systems division or something like that. I absolutely had a lot of interaction with NPL at the time. They in fact came to the ICCC 72 and they had been coming to previous meetings of what is now called Datacomm. Its first incarnation was a long title having to do with the analysis and optimization of computer communication networks, or something like that. This started in late 1969, I think, was when the first meeting happened in Pine Hill, Georgia. I didn't go to that one, but I went to the next one that was at Stanford, I think. That's where I met Scantlebury, I believe, for the first time. Then I had a lot more interaction with him. I would come to the UK fairly regularly, partly for IFIP or INWG reasons
  40. ^ Davies, Shanks, Heart, Barker, Despres, Detwiler and Riml, "Report of Subgroup 1 on Communication System", INWG Note No. 1.
  41. ^ a b Scantlebury, Roger (25 June 2013). "Internet pioneers airbrushed from history". The Guardian. Retrieved 1 August 2015.
  42. ^ Cerf, V.; Kahn, R. (1974). "A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication" (PDF). IEEE Transactions on Communications. 22 (5): 637–648. doi:10.1109/TCOM.1974.1092259. ISSN 1558-0857. The authors wish to thank a number of colleagues for helpful comments during early discussions of international network protocols, especially R. Metcalfe, R. Scantlebury, D. Walden, and H. Zimmerman; D. Davies and L. Pouzin who constructively commented on the fragmentation and accounting issues; and S. Crocker who commented on the creation and destruction of associations.
  43. ^ Davies, Donald Watts; Barber, Derek L. A. (1973), Communication networks for computers, Computing and Information Processing, John Wiley & Sons, ISBN 9780471198741
  44. ^ Frank, Ronald A. (22 October 1975). "Battle for Access Standards Has Two Sides". Computerworld. IDG Enterprise: 17–18.
  45. ^ Abbate, Janet (2000). Inventing the Internet. MIT Press. p. 125. ISBN 978-0-262-51115-5.
  46. ^ Davies, Donald Watts (1979). Computer networks and their protocols. Internet Archive. Chichester, [Eng.]; New York : Wiley. pp. 109, 150–1. ISBN 9780471997504.
  47. ^ Davies, Howard; Bressan, Beatrice (26 April 2010). A History of International Research Networking: The People who Made it Happen. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 978-3-527-32710-2.
  48. ^ "Donald Watts Davies Inventions, Patents and Patent Applications - Justia Patents Search". patents.justia.com. Retrieved 21 October 2023.
  49. ^ a b Feder, Barnaby J. (4 June 2000). "Donald W. Davies, 75, Dies; Helped Refine Data Networks". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 10 January 2020. Donald W. Davies, who proposed a method for transmitting data that made the Internet possible
  50. ^ Waldrop, M. Mitchell (2018). The Dream Machine. Stripe Press. p. 286. ISBN 978-1-953953-36-0. Baran had put more emphasis on digital voice communications than on computer communications.
  51. ^ Pelkey, James L. "6.1 The Communications Subnet: BBN 1969". Entrepreneurial Capitalism and Innovation: A History of Computer Communications 1968–1988. As Kahn recalls: ... Paul Baran's contributions ... I also think Paul was motivated almost entirely by voice considerations. If you look at what he wrote, he was talking about switches that were low-cost electronics. The idea of putting powerful computers in these locations hadn't quite occurred to him as being cost effective. So the idea of computer switches was missing. The whole notion of protocols didn't exist at that time. And the idea of computer-to-computer communications was really a secondary concern.
  52. ^ Kleinrock, L. (1978). "Principles and lessons in packet communications". Proceedings of the IEEE. 66 (11): 1320–1329. doi:10.1109/PROC.1978.11143. ISSN 0018-9219. Paul Baran ... focused on the routing procedures and on the survivability of distributed communication systems in a hostile environment, but did not concentrate on the need for resource sharing in its form as we now understand it; indeed, the concept of a software switch was not present in his work.
  53. ^ a b Harris, p. 9
  54. ^ "Packets of data were the key...". NPL. Retrieved 1 August 2015.
  55. ^ "Donald Watts Davies". Internet Guide. 2010.
  56. ^ Packet Switching
  57. ^ Kleinrock, Leonard (1961), "Information flow in large communication nets", RLE Quarterly Progress Report (1)
  58. ^ Alex McKenzie (2009), Comments on Dr. Leonard Kleinrock's claim to be "the Father of Modern Data Networking", retrieved 23 April 2015 "...there is nothing in the entire 1964 book that suggests, analyzes, or alludes to the idea of packetization."
  59. ^ Isaacson, Walter (2014). The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution. Simon & Schuster. p. 245. ISBN 9781476708690. This led to an outcry among many of the other Internet pioneers, who publicly attacked Kleinrock and said that his brief mention of breaking messages into smaller pieces did not come close to being a proposal for packet switching
  60. ^ Harris
  61. ^ Haughney Dare-Bryan, Christine (22 June 2023). Computer Freaks (Podcast). Chapter Two: In the Air. Inc. Magazine.
  62. ^ "Birthing the Internet: Letters From the Delivery Room; Disputing a Claim". New York Times. 22 November 2001. Retrieved 10 September 2017. Authors who have interviewed dozens of Arpanet pioneers know very well that the Kleinrock-Roberts claims are not believed.
  63. ^ Katie Hefner (8 November 2001), "A Paternity Dispute Divides Net Pioneers", The New York Times, The Internet is really the work of a thousand people," Mr. Baran said. "And of all the stories about what different people have done, all the pieces fit together. It's just this one little case that seems to be an aberration.
  64. ^ Donald Davies (2001), "A Historical Study of the Beginnings of Packet Switching", Computer Journal, British Computer Society, I can find no evidence that he understood the principles of packet switching.[dead link]
  65. ^ "The real story of how the Internet became so vulnerable". Washington Post. Retrieved 18 February 2020. Historians credit seminal insights to Welsh scientist Donald W. Davies and American engineer Paul Baran
  66. ^ "Inductee Details - Paul Baran". National Inventors Hall of Fame. Archived from the original on 6 September 2017. Retrieved 6 September 2017; "Inductee Details - Donald Watts Davies". National Inventors Hall of Fame. Archived from the original on 6 September 2017. Retrieved 6 September 2017.
  67. ^ Roberts, Lawrence G. (November 1978). "The Evolution of Packet Switching" (PDF). IEEE Invited Paper. Archived from the original (PDF) on 31 December 2018. Retrieved 10 September 2017. In nearly all respects, Davies' original proposal, developed in late 1965, was similar to the actual networks being built today.
  68. ^ Yates, David M. (1997). Turing's Legacy: A History of Computing at the National Physical Laboratory 1945-1995. National Museum of Science and Industry. pp. 132–34. ISBN 978-0-901805-94-2. Davies's invention of packet switching and design of computer communication networks ... were a cornerstone of the development which led to the Internet
  69. ^ Berners-Lee, Tim (1999), Weaving the Web: The Past, Present and Future of the World Wide Web by its Inventor, London: Orion, p. 7, ISBN 0-75282-090-7 "The advances by Donald Davies, by Paul Baran, and by Vint Cerf, Bob Khan and colleagues had already happened in the 1970s but were only just becoming pervasive."
  70. ^ Harris, Trevor, University of Wales (2009). Pasadeos, Yorgo (ed.). "Who is the Father of the Internet? The Case for Donald Davies". Variety in Mass Communication Research. ATINER: 123–134. ISBN 978-960-6672-46-0. Archived from the original on 2 May 2022.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
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