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Celebrating The Origins of Packet Switching
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.'"
It has often been said that change is the only constant in the 21st Century.
I've never heard that applied specifically to the 21st century. It's an oddly-specific use of the phrase: does that imply that change has not been constant in other times? Empires grow and fall, cultures collapse or are swept away or conquered by the next Big Empire, customs change, ethnic identities change, etc etc. The only unique thing about the 21st century is that we've inherited a tradition of rapid technological change. Technology is important but it's hardly the only thing that changes over time and it strikes me as fairly myopic to single out the 21st century as a time of change.
It's an oddly-specific use of the phrase: does that imply that change has not been constant in other times?
Re-read it. It says that the only thing that doesn't change in the 21st century is that things change. Arguably, things always change, in which case the phrase is vapid. At the same time, the rate at which things change is accelerating. Compare life in Europe, circa 1000 with 1100. Then compare life in Europe 1900 and 2000 - the differences are much greater!
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
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.
Table-ized A.I.
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.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
If you want to talk about easy digital, packet based networking, then the telegraph is worth a mention. Messages for electronic telegraphs were sent as packets that are later relayed to its final destination. It was also digital in the sense that each character was transmitted as discrete values. Another predecessor to TCP/IP based networking would be the mail system. While it wasn't digital, it was also packet based and as anyone who've used the postal system knows, it's only best effort. For added cost, you can get ack-like behavior with return receipt.
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