[ih] Internet-history Digest, Vol 50, Issue 6

[John Day]

SNIP

> 
> PS: > From: John Day 
> 
>> Packet switching had many advantages, but from the point of view of the
>> inventors (Baran and Davies)
> 
> I'm putting this down here, so it won't distract from my main point (above),
> I would like to point out that an abstract of Baran's 1964 IEEE ToCS paper
> (Paul Baran, "On Distributed Communications Networks", IEEE Transactions on
> Communications Systems, Vol. CS-12 No. 1, pp. 1-9, March 1964) had been
> published in "IEEE Spectrum" (circulation about 160,000 in those days) in
> August 1964, so Baran's basic idea had been circulated very widely well
> before Davies started to think about the problem.
> 
> Which is not to say that Davies _didn't_ genuinely completely independently
> re-invent the concept of packet switching! But it's also _possible_ that the
> germ for the idea came to him, say, in a lunch-time conversation with someone
> who had either i) read about it in IEE Spectrum, or ii) had themselves heard
> about it from a third person.
> 
> At this point, we'll never know for absolute sure. All we _can_ say, _for
> sure_, was that Baran's ideas were published in the open literature in 1964.

Actually, we do know. In Abbate’s book, she recounts how Davies gave a presentation on what he had been working on and a British military person came up to him afterwards and told him about Baran’s work. It was Davies and Scantlebury at the Gatlinburg OS meeting who told Roberts about Baran.

Reading Baran’s report, it is clear he had in mind something like datagrams. He talks about routing each packet independently and his description of ‘hot-potato’ routing definitely But what I find peculiar is that he never pursued it.  I haven’t been able to find a datagram-like project that he pursued.  He seems more fascinated by the emerging T1 technology, which is later borne out by his involvement in Stratacom, which was very much virtual circuit.


> 
>       Noel