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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."
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? ;-)
Learn from the mistakes of others. There isn't enough time to make them all yourself.
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.