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

[vinton cerf]

Baran tried to implement but DCA (now DISA) told him to buzz off. They knew
how to build networks (read: circuit switching) and no punk off the street
was going to tell them differently.

v


On Thu, Jan 11, 2024 at 8:50 PM John Day via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> 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
>
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