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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.""
... it's Microsoft, of course !
I could have sworn that it was Al Gore. He put all of the packets into a lockbox, then switched it for another lockbox.
I thought it was "publish or perish." Now you're telling me it's "publish and perish"?
I'm glad I got out of academia.
Ye Gads!!! Forget packetswiching, this person has learned to communicate from beyond the grave!!
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.
Developers: We can use your help.
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
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?)
I need a TiVo for my car. Pause live traffic now.
According to Hafner's and Lyon's "Where wizards stay up late" (an interesting read), Paul Baran was the guy who invented packet switching in the ARPANET context (he called packets "message blocks"). But AT&T (the company which eventually had to provide the communication lines) wasn't very happy about this idea, so he stopped working on this issue. About the same time, Davies started his experiments (and so did Kleinrock). Kleinrock might have considered packet switching in his very early theoretical articles on data communication, but it's not that clear that he was the first one to do practical, large-scale experiments (this was Davies, IIRC), or to consider packet switching the ARPANET context (clearly Baran).
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
According to this document,
Paul Baran of the Rand Corporation came up with the idea and name
of packet switching in 1962.
They stab it with their steely knives,
But they just can't kill the beast.
Bill explained this quite clearly at his press conference yesterday. If Microsoft didn't invent TCP/IP, open source never would have made it.
When it comes to British inventors/inventions this is all too common occurrence, there is some great innovation in the UK but traditionally they concepts aren't followed through to commercialisation.
It happened to Sir Frank Whittle and the jet engine and consequently the first supersonic fighter, the Bell 1 which was based on the British design after the British Government withdrew funding for the project.
There was also the debacle over public key crypto research at GCHQ.
Donald Davies worked a the National Physical Laboratory in Middlesex, unfortunately the British Govt/Grants agency didn't see the potential of the invention at the time and no funded was given, so he went over to APRA who were throwing money at anything.
Donald died June last year at in Australia, where he went to retire, he didn't get a lot of recognition outside of a few small circles, but he did get quite a few awards from the various computing institutions in the UK, I think he's still relatively unknown in the US, probably because he was too modest, which is why some many scientists can claim to have invented Packet Switching.
Unfortunately I can't find a link. And I'm not sure I've got the right guy. In any case, I distinctly recall reading about a Newton-era, London-based "natural philosopher" revamping the British mail system to be "packet switched" (obviously they didn't call it that then) because he proved that it was cheaper than the old system.
324006
This is Hafner's passage of interest:
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.
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Make mine methylphenidate.
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.
Davies did invent packet switching, and Britain would have been well ahead of the US if the R&D had been funded, unfortuantely, Tony Benn MP, at the time the Science Minister refused to fund it, thus allowing thw US to come in and use what had been created in Britain which then went on to be Arpanet and then the Internet. So born in Britain and raised by the Americans. There is an Open University programme (TV that is) that has an interview with Davies as I recall backfrom the 70s I think where he explains packet switching and the series of events that lead to the knucklehead UK politicians cutting the funding.
Any sufficiently advanced man is indistinguishable from God