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Celebrating The Origins of Packet Switching

Posted by timothy on from the let's-meet-up-at-the-next-node dept.

XaN-ASMoDi writes with an interesting historical piece at the BBC on the early history of packet switching, excerpting: "It has often been said that change is the only constant in the 21st Century. And there is little doubt that the restless tone of these times is something that the web has helped to accelerate, but the only reason that [...] the web can cope with that punishing pace is thanks to work done four decades ago by British mathematician Donald Davies at the UK's National Physical Laboratory (NPL). On 5 August 1968 Dr Davies gave the first public presentation of work he had been doing on a method of moving data around computer networks called 'packet switching.'"

5 of 59 comments (clear)

  1. Multiple sources by Tablizer · · Score: 5, Informative

    Paul A. Baran and Leonard Kleinrock also get credit for packet switching. It appears that multiple inventors independently (or semi-independently) came up with the idea and helped make it usable.

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    Table-ized A.I.
    1. Re:Multiple sources by grumling · · Score: 4, Informative

      There was also the alohanet in Hawaii, which introduced the concept of a shared channel and CSMA/CD:

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALOHAnet

      The article deals with one aspect of packet switching, and it seems more like they were thinking about SONET-like systems.

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    2. Re:Multiple sources by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      Baran was first:

      http://www.livinginternet.com/i/iw_packet_inv.htm

  2. Leonard Kleinrock did it before that (1961) by cmarcond · · Score: 3, Informative

    Well ... it seems, Donald Davies was a little bit late on his work. According to Prof. Leonard Kleinrock (http://www.lk.cs.ucla.edu/), he had actually filed his Phd Thesis at MIT in 1961 creating the underpinnings for packet switching. (Kleinrock, L., "Information Flow in Large Communication Nets", Ph.D. Thesis Proposal, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, July 1961). About 7 years before Davies' talk. Although, they could have worked simultaneously on the same thing, it took years at that time to get something published distributed widely. Nowadays, we have slashdot!

  3. Packet switching was originally developed... by stox · · Score: 4, Informative

    by Paul Baran in the early 1960's.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packet_switching

    Baran developed the concept of packet switching during his research at the RAND Corporation for the US Air Force into survivable communications networks, first presented to the Air Force in the summer of 1961 as briefing B-265 [1] then published as RAND Paper P-2626 in 1962 [1], and then including and expanding somewhat within a series of eleven papers titled On Distributed Communications in 1964 [2]. Baran's P-2626 paper described a general architecture for a large-scale, distributed, survivable communications network. The paper focuses on three key ideas: first, use of a decentralized network with multiple paths between any two points; and second, dividing complete user messages into what he called message blocks (later called packets); then third, delivery of these messages by store and forward switching.

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