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

[John Day]

This got away from me fixing another email. Ignore that one and I will finish this one.  ;-)

On Jan 11, 2024, at 20:49, 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 in the UK on what he had been working on and a British military person came up to him afterwards and told him about Baran’s work. At which point, Davies looked it up and refers to it.  It was Davies and Scantlebury at the Gatlinburg OS meeting who told Roberts about Baran.  (And also convinced Roberts not to use 2.4Kbps lines for the ARPANET.) ;-)

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 datagrams.  

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.  As I said, he seems to be aware of the advantages over message switching (all that existed when he wrote), but never spends much time on it that aspect of it.  He covers priority, precedence, and congestion, but never contrasts it to message switching.  Even in the mid to late 70s, the DoD people were still worried about short messages getting stuck behind long ones, which of course couldn’t happen on the ARPANET at least not by more than a few 100 ms.

It would be really nice if someone could shed some light on this.

Take care,
John

> 
>      Noel

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