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.""

Comments

Dispute?

[Sc00ter]

"Kleinrock, whose lab was the first node on Arpanet, is willing to concede that Davies invented the term "packet-switching.""

If Kleinrock conceded, then there's not really a dispute, is there?

What's the point?

[truthsearch]

Flamebait, but I've got karma to burn... Does this really matter? No offense to either party involved. They've both obviously contributed valuable work to society. But this is just another piece of the puzzle, and they can share credit for it. I'm sure it's listed on both of their resumes.

If anyone could explain why this gains news-worthy attention, please post. If this dispute does in fact matter to anyone but the parties involved, I'd like to know how.

Naming Rights and Name Switching

[Kailden]

Then again, who invented packets? Who invented bytes? who invented bits? who invented the binary system? (I heard it was sheperds who needed to count lots of sheep so the used thier fingers as representations of powers of two.) Who invented numeric series? who advance math beyond numeric purity? who invented thought? Why does everyone want to take credit for everything? Too many battles are fought over naming rights....when the history revisionists will ultimately decide...not any single inventor. I mean there are still works of music, writing, and math from the Middle Ages on up that are attributed to the wrong people...(who invented inflated biographies?)

The real victim is society

[CmdrTroll]

Whether the dispute be over bragging rights (as it is in this case), patent rights, or any other motivation, it is astounding to see how many talented techies are tying themselves up by squabbling over trivial matters like credit and ego.

This kind of thing, though human nature, does little to counter the commonly-held image of the technology industry as being run by a bunch of self-absorbed, egotistical credit hogs. That's really a shame. It would be so much more productive to society if these people would concentrate more on innovating, applying their talents, and other productive activities. Not on taking credit for what happened 30 years ago. What a terrible waste. As somebody who has his name on several patents but would never waste his time fighting for them, I am ashamed.

</rant>

-CT

This is a big mess.

[The Cunctator]

This is something I've done a lot of research about, and in fact have discussed this issue with Kleinrock and Stewart Brand (who is pro-Baran & Davies), and read Davies' paper. The first thing people should know is that Katie Hafner is the author of "Where Wizards Stay Up Late", a book she assiduously researched but which many of the participants within claim she did a bad job on. I think they might be confusing some of it with Janet Abbate's "Inventing the Internet", which I wasn't terribly impressed by.

This is Hafner's passage of interest:

By the end of July, 1968, Roberts had finished drafting the RFP...It was a rich piece of technical prose, filled with an eclectic mix of ideas. Kleinrock had influsenced Roberts's earliest thoughts about the theoretical possibilities. Baran had contributed to the intellectual foundation on which the technical concept was based, and Roberts's dynamic routing scheme gave an extra nod to Baran's work; Roberts had adopted Davies' term "Packet" and incorporated his and Scantlebury's higher line speeds; Clark's subnet idea was a stroke of technical genius.

Then she continues with a quote from Baran that "Everything is tied to everything else" with respect to who did the most important part.

It's weird, because from my perspective the participants seem to be arguing and use strong language like "spreading lies" to describe the alternative history, but when you look at the specifics, the dispute lies on some very fine nuances which are evidently impossible to untangle now, and may only be creations of recent times.

The number one question, to my understanding, is whether packet switching is such a central concept that the work by Baran and Davies which details it (since they both built experimental packet-switching networks and then wrote extensively about them, providing a base of information for Roberts) is important, or whether it really should just be understood as a relatively arbitrary (and self-obvious) implementation of multiple-node store-and-forward queuing theory, which Kleinrock is the father of, no question.

Did Baran and Davies' work matter to the ARPANET? It pretty much has to have. Baran wrote multiple volumes of detailed information from his experimental network; those volumes were available to and used by Bob Taylor, Roberts' boss and (according to Brand, at least) in the Baran camp, and Roberts credits them heavily in his early work.

All the early documentary evidence points only to Baran and Davies. However, the close association of Roberts and Kleinrock, the fact that Roberts helped Kleinrock do his thesis by doing programming for it (funny fact: the third guy in their little Lincoln Lab thesis group was Ivan Sutherland), and Kleinrock's lab's role as the first IMP site and ARPANET analysis center makes it absurd to believe that Kleinrock's influence wasn't major.

Of course, framing the dispute this way ignores how crucial the work of BBN was in all of this; they were amazing in designing and building the IMP. While Roberts' RFP had insane amounts of information, the IMP Guys did equivalent amounts of new work and recreation of ideas in their proposal.