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Leonard Kleinrock On The Origins of Packet Switching

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the who-thought-what-when dept.

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."

8 of 137 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Is it really that clever? by Beetjebrak · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Umm, yes, it is that clever. When you send someone a letter (one of those cool paper things with ink on 'em), you expect it to arrive on time and in one piece. This is exactly what snailmail does. The postal service picks up your letter, routes it through their distribution channels, and delivers it to the recipient's mailbox. Now what if your company wishes to send out an enormous box containing for example a new big screen TV to some customer? You probably won't use regular mail, but have a heavier-duty delivery service handle it at a higher price because the postman would break his back lugging your box across the city. But what if there were no alternative? Man, that postman would be SLOW! Same goes for electronic bandwidth. If you'd send a single small e-mail out as a single entity (packet if you will), the chances of it arriving properly at the recipient's inbox are pretty good. This is because the tiny little email doesn't pull a lot of bandwidth and will relatively easily slip through more or less congested lines. Sending out the 2-hour video of your wedding as a single packet across a routed network is bound to give problems. Somewhere along the line the network gets congested because your huge video can't go throught he same pipe together with the next guy's MP3 collection. Result: digital roadblock and there is no such thing as UPS on the internet to deliver big packets. The smart bit on packet switching in analogy to snail mail (considering the fact that we're talking 1962 here) is this: you'd never chop that big screen TV into little pieces so a small army of postmen could swiftly deliver it to your customer and reassemble it on the spot. It must have required a pretty brilliant leap of thought to actually do this for data. Intuitively you'd think the risk of data corruption would be too great with this disassembly- reassembly-step. Luckily we're dealing with computers here, not humans, so packet switching actually did turn out a big success. PS. I know my analogy here is flawed, but hey, you get the point, right? ;-)

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    Learn from the mistakes of others. There isn't enough time to make them all yourself.
  2. Moderator IQ test by Sanity · · Score: 2, Insightful
    This is a generic reply that could be written in response to any Slashdot article describing a new scientific advance - honestly, read it again. I have often thought that it would be fun to do this, create a small number of pre-canned responses designed to get moderated up but which actually don't say anything - looks like someone else got there first.

    Whichever idiot moderated it up deserves eternal ridicule.

  3. US Law by glowingspleen · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Whoever owns the patent, wins. Even that guy who said "Let's Roll"'s family lost their right to the phrase b/c someone quickly patented it.

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    Let me give you the lowdown
  4. How about Donald Davies by Aztech · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Donald Davies is largely acknowledged for developing Packet Switching (and even coining that very phrase) at the National Physical Laboratory in the UK, however he was not American so he's largely ignored.

    1. Re:How about Donald Davies by Aztech · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I have, Donald Davies is usually ignored or maligned, he died in 2000 so you can't argue with a dead man, that's why I find the article somewhat nauseating.

    2. Re:How about Donald Davies by dillon_rinker · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The 1962 paper is interesting...Surprsingly the above paper doesn't mention the word 'packet' once, which is a bit of a contradiction if you claim to have invented 'packet switching'

      He credits Davies with coining the term "packet switching." You seem to be saying that if you don't use the currently popular name when you first describe your idea, then you're not the originator of the idea...the guy who thinks up the popular name is the inventor.

      By your reasoning, Newton, who coined the term "calculus" should get all the credit for the development of that branch of mathematics, and Leibniz should get none, since the German-speaking Leibniz didn't use the term "calculus." (In case you're not up on your history of mathematics, Leibniz independently co-developed calculus and is credited in many non-English speaking countries as the developer of that branch of mathematics.)

      Your rhetorical skills are sorely lacking. First Davies is the inventor because everyone knows he is, and now he's the inventor because he was the first to name it by the name you know it by. Here's my question:

      What's your evidence for your belief that Davies either developed the concepts prior to Kleinrock, did more significant development work than Kleinrock, or for some other reason has a stronger term to the title "Inventor of Packet Switchng"?

      My position is that the title is about as valid as "Inventor of the World Wide Web" and that all these guys should take a lesson from Newton..."If I have seen farther than others, it is because I am standing on the shoulders of giants...

  5. If you are karma whoring... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    ..please post at least up-to-date and correct information.
    Bbbbrrrr, calling ATM "a new technology".

  6. Re:everyone knows... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful
    "So someone at GOP spin control thinks the issue important enough to tell their people to log into slashdot, see ifthey have mod points and mod people down. And no, I am not making this up, they really do do that sorta thing these days, pretty pathetic eh?"

    Prove it. Provide evidence for this claim, other than just "well, some anti-Gore stuff [which could have been posted by Naderines] appeared on /.".

    Failing to do so, we can all conclude that you're a liar for saying "I am not making this up".