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

[John Day]

Right as did several other organizations, including AT&T. Who finally said they would but Baran backed off knowing they would screw it up.  Which in my estimation, he was right!!  ;-)

> On Jan 11, 2024, at 21:02, vinton cerf <vgcerf at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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 <mailto: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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