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Who Invented Packet-Switching?
Saint Aardvark writes "It's how the Internet works, and now who invented packet-switching is under dispute. A posthumous paper by British scientist Dr. Donald Davies disputes the claim by Leonard Kleinrock to have invented the technique, saying Kleinrock never took it beyond the case of a single node. Kleinrock, whose lab was the first node on Arpanet, is willing to concede that Davies invented the term "packet-switching.""
Kleinrock conceded that Davies invented the term packet-switching, but not the concept of packet switching. William Gibson is credited with coining the term "cyberspace", yet he is not involved in this debate of who invented the internet.
"Now gluttony and exploitation serves eight!" - TV's Frank
It is really hard to tell who invented Internet, must be lots of people. I don't like "Leonard Kleinrock, Professor" webpage to claim he is the inventor. At least show me a publication, tell us you real have the vision on packet switch before you put a single node on. At least, single node is far from Internet. Shanon left us a great paper to tell us what is the limit of communication, we are trying hard to approach it.
We can not say the company working on Turbo coding invented/discovered Shanon therory, can we?
Leonard Kleinrock 's work is on Queueing theory, not packet switch. He maybe a pioneer, but not worth the Inventor title. I agree on this, "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."
You agree with me or not? :)
The actual text of Davies' paper is available in Google's cache here
This article makes it clear that, although the first tests of packet switching were done in Great Britain, the idea was initially kicked around by the dudes at the RAND Institute. I also have heard speculation that Bell Labs had explored this as a possibility as early as the early '60's, but had rejected it as a way to gain reliability in their network due to cost considerations (A-D converters and computers being a bit more expensive at the time).
That is all.
'As with most legends, there is some element of truth at the core of this one, but some considerable confusion over the details. This particular confusion traces back to the work of Rand Corporation engineer Paul Baran, one of the three people with some claim to having independently developed the ideas of packet switching. Baran described some of the methods of packet switching in a series of eleven reports published in 1964 with the title "On Distributed Communications."'
... Before he finished his graduate research, Kleinrock learned of Paul Baran's work, and he cites Baran in his dissertation. But, well before he learned of Baran's ideas for a distributed process network, Kleinrock had analyzed the statistical behavior of such networks. Kleinrock has some claim to priority in the concepts of packet switching, in a 1961 quarterly lab report, "Information Flow in Large Communication Nets," and he published the first textbook discussion of packet switching network behaviors in 1964, Communication Nets: Stochastic Message Flow and Delay.'
'The phrase "packet switching" was coined by Donald Davies, another of the three independent "inventors" of packet switching. Davies was working on designs for distributed computer communications at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in England.'
'The ARPANET development would be closely affected by the third of the independent "inventors" of packet switching--Leonard Kleinrock.
-- The Roots of Packet Switching Networks.
The paper by Davies is available online here.
Tim