Donald Davies: End Transmission

RalfM writes: "D. W. Davies,landmark scientist, has passed away. He coined the term 'packet switching' and did lots of research on the whole gamut of networking and data transmission. Read about it here." Not many people can claim "I conceived the use of a purpose-designed network employing packet switching in which the stream of bits is broken up into short messages, or 'packets', that find their way individually to the destination, where they are reassembled into the original stream."

Comments

Re:But, why would anyone want to say...

[BrianH]

Too true. A few months back I was explaining some of the basics of the Internet to some prospective clients when one of them asked me how long I'd been using it. I told him that I'd first used the Internet in 1989 and that I'd used the Web since mid-1994. Out of nowhere one of the clients looked at me and said "You're lying, the Internet wasn't even invented until 1995!"

I was honestly to stunned to even reply for a good 30 seconds. When I did try to correct him, he immediately got defensive and insinuated that I was trying to pull something over on them. When I finally chuckled and said "And I'll bet you think Microsoft invented the Internet", he looked at me in all seriousness and said "No. AOL did."

Needless to say, I didn't get the contract. In retrospect, that was probably a good thing :)

D.W. Davies contributions

[javaDragon]

D.W. Davies left a strong trace inside the core of our internet world, his name can even be found in RFCs.

First, his contribution to the creation of the Internet :

RFC243 and RFC290 (bibliography) :

D. W. Davies, "Communication Networks to Serve Rapid-response
Computers," Proc IFIP Congress 68, p. 650-656, August 1968.

D. W. Davies, "The Principles of a Data Communication Network for
Computers and Remote Peripherals," Proc IFIP Congress 68, p. 709-714,
August 1968.

RFC2235 (Internet Timeline) :

1967
ACM Symposium on Operating Principles
- Plan presented for a packet-switching network
- First design paper on ARPANET published by Lawrence G. Roberts

National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in Middlesex, England develops
NPL Data Network under D. W. Davies

Second, contributions concerning security :

RFC1750 (randomness generation) :

[...] It has been shown by Donald W. Davies that this sort of shifted partial output feedback significantly weakens an algorithm compared will feeding all of the output bits back as input. In particular, for DES, repeated encrypting a full 64 bit quantity will give an expected repeat in about 2^63 iterations. Feeding back anything less than 64 (and more than 0) bits will give an expected repeat in between 2**31 and 2**32 iterations!
[...]

RFC2025 (public key mechanism, bibliography) :

[Davi89]: D. W. Davies and W. L. Price, "Security for Computer
Networks", Second Edition, John Wiley and Sons, New York, 1989.