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Who Invented Packet-Switching?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the battle-of-giants dept.

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.""

2 of 161 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Dispute? by peter_gzowski · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

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    "Now gluttony and exploitation serves eight!" - TV's Frank
  2. For more information... by frank_adrian314159 · · Score: 3, Informative
    ... you can always check out this little page by Bruce Stirling.

    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).

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    That is all.