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Leonard Kleinrock On The Origins of Packet Switching
An Anonymous Coward writes: "From Ben Sullivan's Tech Blog (http://www.techblog.com). An email from Leonard Kleinrock on why he really was the brains behind packet switching. It's a first-hand account from Kleinrock in a blog. A neat little journalistic scoop for bloggers, and some insights for techheads on Internet history."
Kleinrock is claiming too much credit.
Yes, his work on queueing theory is important, at least to people concerned with math and network analytics. And if anybody gives a damn about analyzing the performance of a packet-switched network mathematically, then it'll fall back onto Kleinrock's work.
But what passes for packet switching nowadays -- "The Internet" -- is most certainly not the result of careful analysis! It works by brute force. It's inefficient. It is badly monitored and mostly unmetered. So Kleinrock's analysis, which might be useful, is ignored.
Anybody with half a sense of the math wouldn't dare try to cram constant-rate streaming traffic, like telephony or broadcasting, onto the IP Internet. It's inefficient as hell. Economy of scale is what makes it seem to work, compared to economy of specialization (what ATM would excel at). But that's the Internet's current ruling ethos -- if it seems to work, do it, even to excess.
The original inventors -- Davies, Baran, and the BBN crew -- were not doing mathematical optimization. They were hacking (in the good sense) something together and observing what worked. Kleinrock is like a guy who invents a great network management system that never gets turned on, but who still claims credit for the network that his system might have been able to manage.
And puh-LEEZ, don't give Vint any of the credit. He's made a great living as the Chauncy Gardiner of the Internet.