Donald Davies
loreThe National Physical Laboratory scientist who arrived at the same idea independently in the mid-1960s, named it packet switching, and built a working network at NPL to prove it.
Baran had the concept and Davies gave it the word, which is not a small contribution: the term packet is what let engineers, funders and standards bodies talk about the thing without arguing about what to call it. He also did what the theory needed - an actual node, running, at Teddington - and the ARPANET design took from both men, with the terminology coming from him and the resilience argument from Baran. Independent arrival at the same answer, on two continents, is the strongest evidence that the idea was ready rather than lucky.
Also known as: davies, npl
Sources
- National Academies memorial tribute to Paul Baran, on the RAND studies and the parallel work at NPL
- Living Internet - the invention of packet switching, Baran and Davies
- The National Museum of Computing, NPL Technology of the Internet Gallery: Davies's ideas were first presented in public at the ACM symposium in Gatlinburg in 1967, and in that same year NPL's packet switching ideas were adopted by the US Department of Defense