Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
News

Donald Davies: End Transmission 64

Posted by timothy from the transition-states dept.
RalfM writes: "D. W. Davies,landmark scientist, has passed away. He coined the term 'packet switching' and did lots of research on the whole gamut of networking and data transmission. Read about it here." Not many people can claim "I conceived the use of a purpose-designed network employing packet switching in which the stream of bits is broken up into short messages, or 'packets', that find their way individually to the destination, where they are reassembled into the original stream."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Donald Davies: End Transmission More

Donald Davies: End Transmission

Comments Filter:
  • But it is sad how in today's era of mass commercialism and consumerism, that any advances, especially technological ones, are eventually and pitifully reduced to a tacky marketable product all for the sake of a quick profit.


    Oh come now. It's not all for the sake of a quick profit, it's about making something USEFUL for people.

    Inventing packet switching is a big technological deal but it doesn't mean anything for an average joe until the international infrastructure is in place to actually use this technology.

    Ditto for the light bulb, or the steam engine.

    This is the difference between invention, innovation, and marketing. Invention is about creating new things. Innovation is about making new things useful. Marketing is telling people about it. You can't have any without the other.

    Technical people, especially engineers, have a hard time understanding this.
  • J Swan did not invent the incandescent light bulb.

    From Websters: "to think up; devise or fabricate in the mind "

    The incandescent light bulb was invented by an American, J Starr, in 1845. Starr developed the concept of a carbonized conductor in a sealed glass container as a light production method. Swan was the first to show an implementation of Starr's idea. Unfortunatley it did not work very well at all. Edison showed a vastly superior implementation one year later.

  • Screw you. I find your objection, to be objectional. I just hope that when I go some will have something witty to say about me.

  • That as long as we know that Al Gore invented the Internet. ;)

    I agree, there are so many people who helped bring the Internet to it's present state, that it's almost impossible to know them all, and where exactly their contributions fit.

    For example, without Von Neumann and Dijkstra, Cerf would have had nothing to work with but a string and some cans. The name Shannon comes to mind, and some freak named Tesla as well.

    And while giving credit where credit is due, let's mention Eve, without whom Adam would never have had the impetus to KNOW things. :) The Internet is the work of the devil, there we have it. :)
  • At least he didn't say "I conceived the use ..." with the added phrase "And I patented it!" Think of where we would be today if he had.
  • Give me a break AC, this is tactless.
  • It's unfortunate that scientests don't get more recognition than they deserve. We have sports role models that are glorified more, and what do they do? Play a game really well? These scientists contribute to our fundamental understanding of the universe. They help advance the human race and allow us to attain a higher intellegence. *moment of silence for Donald Davies*
  • Does anyone know how to get ahold of original paper he presented on packet switching? - Dustin -
  • As I understand it, when Davies invented packet switching, circuit switching was the dominant paradigm. This is how telephone networks operate, and it means that if A wants to communicate with Z, A opens a dedicated connection to Z which stays up until they are finished. It's obviously the most intuitive way, which is why most communication is still implemented using the illusion of "Sockets", but it's incredibly wasteful of resources. Packet switching allows data to be rerouted in mid-transmission without interrupting it. If the Internet relied on circuit switching, it would be nowhere near as efficient if it is now.

    My point is this: if Davies hadn't thought of it, it's extremely possible nobody else would have. And without that, we might have no Internet as we know it.
  • -- Begin Quote --
    But it is sad how in today's era of mass commercialism and consumerism, that any advances, especially technological ones, are eventually and pitifully reduced to a tacky marketable product all for the sake of a quick profit.
    -- End Quote --

    Would the tacky marketable products include pornography, which I don't think the internet was invented for....

    Worth a thought how even television or even printed press was invented probably to teach people, yet pornography seems to have used it...

    Ah well...
    JimmyGulp
  • You forgot Jon Postel!
  • ACK

    Shouldn't it be FIN
    :)

    --Ty

  • Are you sure that he wasn't yanking your chain? OTOH, there are some pretty clueless people out there...

  • The Ed Krol book is still an interesting read. It was authored in the early '90s ('92 ?), so the 'Net was already well established but clearly in a state of flux. Most usage was mail, usenet and ftp.

    The Web (sic) gets a a very brief mention in it, but in the form of WAIS and Gopher, not WWW and HTML

  • invent a light bulb [...]
    95% of the people who read this will know exactly who

    Easy - Swan (another Brit) invented the incandescent lightbulb. (No, it wasn't Edison)

    I expect to see a flurry of postings about how both Davies and PSS were American.
    After all, America is happy enough to steal our U-boat stories.

  • There are less and less people who understand the way data is routed, the way bits are composed, the fact that it's 1024 and not 1000, and the way the world works... and there are more and more script kiddies and clueless teenagers... It's a sad day, but it can be turned into happiness. Let's all shut down our routers for a few minutes in dedication to him (no please don't do this if you are a large ISP). Regardless, I think more people should pay attentiont to what they are doing.
  • Offtopic, but Philo Farnsworth invented the TV as we know it.
  • From the article [fairfax.com.au]: Other scientists also came to the same conclusion at about the same time.

    There have been so many instances of a scientist not receiving due credit [concentric.net] for his developments. I'm glad to see this isn't the case with Mr. Davies. (However, it would be neat to see who else worked on the same concept at the time.)

    --
    "Give him head?" ... "Be a beacon?"

    "One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft Ad
  • This is another common misconception, that John Loggie Baird (sp?) invented modern television. His invention used a mechanical scanning disk, not an electron gun. The electron gun TV was a seperate invention (And i can't even name it's inventor off the top of my head). Baird still gets the credit for inventing TV, however.

    Dude. Philo Farnsworth!

    --Emmett

  • I have read this document and it explicitly states in the summary: "The payoff in terms of survivability for a distributed configuration in the cases of enemy attacks directed against nodes, links, or combinations of nodes and links is demonstrated." Now, I understand that there is no mention in this section that mentions nuclear war, but in 1964, what other major attack threat existed?

    --
  • I agree. Thanks for your hard work that served as the basis of what many take for granted. Please know that many still appreciate all that you have given us.

    --
  • Well, of course my corpse will send a FIN (to the Matrix of course), but ACK is the noise that I am going to make!
  • Why was this moderated down? I laughed.
  • What joker marked this Insightful?

    It's gotta be a joke. Allen Konrad is the guy that patented the post method [slashdot.org].

    -fp
  • "Not many people can claim 'I conceived the use of a purpose-designed network employing packet switching in which the stream of bits is broken up into short messages, or 'packets', that find their way individually to the destination, where they are reassembled into the original stream.'" Not unless you're Owl Gore, of course!
  • Everything is obvious and trivial once all the bugs are worked out of it and *very* smart men have worked on it for a very long time. Given if Dr. Davies had not done it someone else most likely would have and given it was more of a group effort but all really good research is. The point is he came up with it first and/or best and worked on it in a very big way. So yes this is important.
  • No, Microsoft has not killed the creativity of the industry. It's alive and well, and doing what it's done all along, hacking in silence for the sheer thrill of it all. Occasionally, the small hacks, the fixes, the conglomerations of the hacks of the people around them come together and create something that the world has never seen before, and that looks like it came out of nowhere.

    The heroes come from where they always have, the masses of people in a community. The next hero could be working in his college dorm, coding with the stereo blaring and roomates begging for him to turn off the damn light. The next hero could be working in his cubicle right now, silently contemplating a project brought by the higher-ups. The heros are there, they just haven't commited their act that gets them noticed yet.

    Microsoft hasn't killed the industry, not by a long shot. Any industry, such as this one, that works very close to pure thought will have its Prima Donnas that come out after a while, but they fade in time. Where are Burroughs, DEC, etc? They used to be big, maybe huge, but the industry moved on without them, their moment was over. We're already starting to see that with Microsoft, they've all but peaked, and are falling back down.

    So the pioneers always die, in the end. But they're replaced, and the coding goes on. So, let's take a moment to praise Donald Davies' life, and then get back to creating more greatness. I'm sure that's what he would want.

  • > ACK But God will likely be more interested in your SYNs. Chris Mattern
  • steal your U-boat stories? There you go again, stealing German U-boat stories and trying to finger us.

    ----
  • Rest in peace, Donald Davies. Your brainchild will live an existance infinite. I know you can see this. Maradine
  • What the hell are you talking about? Back in 65 I was on the original team that invented the internet. We were extremely smart even then and that is why we make a lot of money even now. Please get your facts straight...

    --

  • LOL! Nice try, but your whole dot thing is getting tired now.

  • Once in a while an idea is concived at the same time at different places by different people. This was the case with packet-switching networks too.

    When Davies was working on his ideas about pakets it came to his attention that another researcher, Paul Baran, had the same ideas. Baran had published a number of reports [mids.org] working for RAND on this topic.

    It is often stated that Internet was built like it is to withstand a nuclear attack. This was not a concern for Davies and this team, but was indeed one of the reasons Baran was trying to come up with a new architecture. So Internet as we know it today has nothing much to do with nuclears, but it makes a good story I guess. :)

    This is all described in the book Where Wizards Stay up Late [simonsays.com]. A fine read for anyone who is interested in the history of Internet and the people that made it happen.

    /bootsy

  • ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

    î+ ßËGîÑ:

    +HË QÜîÇK ß®ØWÑ Ø× JÜMËÐ Ø\/Ë® +HË ÅZ ÐØG.

    HØW Wî î+ ËÑÐ?

    ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

  • He also coauthored the first paper on message
    authenticators. I phoned him a month ago to get
    the OK to put it on my web site:

    http://www.cix.co.uk/~klockstone

    The first report was dated 1983 and the later
    1988 version was adopted as an ISO standard.
    I can imagine an interesting with St Peter on
    the subject of keys....
  • Just pressed a virtual flower into my 1973 first edition hardcover: Communication Networks for Computers; Donald W. Davies, Derek L. A. Barber, National Physical Laboratory, Teddington; Wiley; ISBN 0-471-19874-9

    I landed this book in '78 when I was barely a teen -- and it blew my mind apart and opened a new world.

    At the time I was banging away in TRS80 BASIC and Z80 assembler. Modems were 300 baud, 'telnet' wasn't a protocol, it was Telenet, the world's largest X.25 packet network. Dial an access number, give a 'C' followed by a telephone area code and pick two extra digits and -- zing! A login: prompt coming to you from a machine in New York, Omaha, Los Angeles. Before Internet there was ARPAnet. Before ARPAnet there were HOSTs and IMPs; and there was Telenet.

    Davies' book was no guide to any particular network -- it was a bible of Communication Theory itself, a Gray's Anatomy of telephony and packet switching. From the subscriber loop to crossbar switches, carrier networks, traffic analysis and routing; modulation modes; for data -- from NAND gates to shift registers shuffling bits to parity checking, buffers, packets to queues, state automata, handshaking, protocol layers, virtual connections... culminating in a clear and concise description of a very new, very interesting 28-node experiment called "ARPAnet".

    As a programmer I began my career shuffling strings and numbers around, just as early communications centered around simple modulation technique, bits and bytes. There soon came a time when I bumped limits of time and space, storage and response time: the 255 character string, the 64k heap. My elegantly written BASIC masterpieces filled the heap and started collecting garbage more frequently -- then stopped.

    You trim, consolidate, generalize and flush. You break the program into overlay segments and watch your response time erode further still, because all the optimization you can muster has merely bought you... more time.

    As I absorbed the principles of Communications Theory so well presented in that book, examples taken from real life, an amazing thing happened: I began to see communication networks everywhere -- between people, in operating systems, in my own software and the software I would later write.

    If you are smart and resourceful (an avid apprentice of Knuth) you can build data structures that move method bit by bit into the data itself to create smarter data, procedure embedded within the data. But even these castles must funnel through the meat grinders of the trade: registers, pools of memory, character and block devices, modems.

    If you are clever you can work around immediate limitations and stretch resources to an amazing degree.

    But there is a moment of sublime brilliance in store for you if you can take the roadmap that is your human tendancy towards procedural thinking -- fold it a certain way, cut it into pieces and find the magic glue to connect it again... so you now have a tightly folded crane resting delicately on its feet. It represents the same system. It still has limitations but their impact on your design has been reduced not by a linear factor but an _exponential_ one.

    You will pay a penalty... there are now more folds than there existed in the original design. But upon close examination you can see that there are fewer _types_ of folds, and some of the folds embody behaviors that may be inherited from others.

    This mental origami is "state oriented" thinking. It is what communication networks do swiftly under penalty of death; it is what compilers do once, interpreters do constantly and late-binding languages try to do only as often as they must.

    Contemplation of state is what Object Oriented programmers do until or unless they become mired in calling conventions; the stack becomes their grail, while procedural programmers keep time by the statement.

    We code smart objects, apply -O3 and hope for the best -- a few subroutines collapse together and a fair amount of code is consolidated to keep things in the architechural neighborhood... but groundbreaking brilliance can only occur when people take charge of the process on a grandly recursive scale.

    Even Object Oriented approaches can fall prey to procedural thinking. ++ lets you fold your code together and breathe life into the data... but you can never forget that the compiler is there, so long as you directly manage pointers or your integers lack the magic to evolve dynamically.

    Where we once fought 255 character strings, we now use 'elegant' GUI that stuffs pulldown list boxes with abandon -- only to hit the swap too soon and eventually smack into a 64k item limit. Worse yet, no limit -- and the user must wade through minutes of swap swamp to select the first item on the list.

    Or one little static buffer whose job is to swallow a MIME tag encounters an elaborately crafted superstring with a nasty bit of assembly tacked into it, and a root shell is born. Or a computer freezes because a counter folds to zero after a few weeks of furious ticking.

    [continued]
  • Applied Communications Theory teaches us that strings may be finite, but >streams

  • >And i can't even name it's inventor off the top of my head

    That's because two teams were working on it simultaneously, a large-scale one from RCA, who were trying to get the same rights for television that they had with radios -- per-unit royalties (the MPAA and RIAA didn't invent this kind of content distribution licensing concept, they're just standing on the shoulders of giants), and a smaller private team lead by Philo Farnsworth.

    It's a long, sordid story, but in the long run, Farnsworth won the 'TV arms race,' but because of nasty patent disputes and the like, RCA won the mindshare race and Farnsworth went broke. Some number of years later, the patent dispute was settled in his favor, and RCA began to have to reimburse Farnsworth, but he'd already dropped out of inventing, and died bitter and angry.

    FYI.
    --
  • You didn't get the contract because he thought you were lying, you didn't get it because your reply was less than respectful.

    I run into that all the time. When I say that I've been on the internet since 1988, most people are amazed! Then all I have to do is explain that I was in college at that time, and the internet was mostly an academic domain at that time. It makes sense, and it's respectful.

    If you're a consultant, you should view yourself as a fancy teacher. There are no dumb questions.
  • It's sad to lose somebody like him. He co-authored the first good books on data communication networks.

  • You make it sound like we'd be in the information dark ages if it weren't for this single fellow. You don't honestly believe that, do you?

    I'm not taking away any of the guy's contributions, but your rant accomplishes the very thing you're complaining about.

    Cheers,
    ZicoKnows@hotmail.com

  • There are no dumb questions.
    I usually hear it "There are no stupid questions."
    My standard response: "But there are stupid people."

    My longer response, produced only when people argue:
    It was two minutes before the tenth-grade Algebra I class would end. I was talking to some of the students about orbits and gravity; I'd sketched a circle and a space ship to demonstrate. A (blond female) student asked "But how do they get back in?"
    "What do you mean?"
    She walked up to my drawing. "If this is the earth, and this," she drew a dot inside the circle, "is Cape Canaveral, how do they get in there?"
    "I'm sorry, I still don't understand."
    "How can they get in? See, they're up here," she pointed to the space ship, "and they want to get here," she drew a line from the space ship to Cape Canaveral, "how do they get in without hitting the edge?" She pointed to where her line intersected the circle. "Won't they hit the earth right here?"

    Fortunately, the bell rang, because I had no answer. She didn't comprehend the difference between two dimensions and three. THAT was when I decided that the education professors who said things like "There are no stupid questions" were smoking crack. There is such a thing as an unacceptable level of ignorance, and I think it's morally wrong to misrepresent reality by suggesting otherwise. If I'm ever in a seminar where the instructor says "There are no stupid questions," I do my best to immediately prove them wrong.

    Also, if you're a consultant, you generally have a greater freedom to choose your boss. Never pick a stupid boss if you can help it.
  • There is a book which you can find at ye ol Fatbrain titled Where Wizards Stay Up Late [fatbrain.com] that is an interesting read (if your a true geek) about the whole ARPANET thing. It talks a bit about Davies and the whole idea of breaking data into packets. It turns out that there was a fellow in the US who came up with the idea at about the same time as Davies.

    The books a bit dry at times but worth a read if your into that sort of thing
  • I believe it's a Pratchett novel where the answer is given "anybody can invent *that*" .. "But the thing is, you didn't, did you?"...

    Anyway.
    A posthoumous thank-you to the chap for kicking the ball off, sort of thing.
    ~Tim
    --
    .|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,
  • He was the first one to come up with Wonkavision, which takes *people* and "splits them up into a million pieces which go whizzing through the air and come down into your TV set where they're put together again in the right order."

    Apologies for the joke at someone's expense, but it's been ages since I've been able to use a good Willie Wonka reference. :)

    --
  • OK, this may be flamebait, and I certainly don't want to be disrepectful of a guy who apparently is a major pioneer, in many other respects.
    But I just wonder if packet switching wasn't just an idea whose time had come? It is a fairly natural solution to traffic problems in general.
    Certainly more obvious than rendering mouse pointers on bit-mapped graphical terminals using XOR in hardware ... anyway, thank god packet switching was not patented ...
  • Here is his bio [ucla.edu] which seems to leave no doubt as to who he thinks invented packet switched networking. Of course in 1961 he would still have been in grad school.

    According to The Living Internet [livinginternet.com] (which seems to be as good a museum as any of the others mentioned):

    Packet switching is a wonderful idea first discovered by Leonard Kleinrock [livinginternet.com], and then independently by Paul Baran [livinginternet.com] and Donald Davies [livinginternet.com]. This independent development, within just a few years, suggests that packet switching is a fundamental idea that wanted to be discovered.

  • Websters as a reliable authority ?

    Swan produced the first vaguely reliable lightbulb, received the first patent, mass-produced the first usable bulbs (in Newcastle, before the Swan Edison company), and is even reported to have independently invented the carburised filament. Starr described (sic) the idea of using a carburised filament, but didn't specify a useful material to use, didn't have a means of sealing the envelope after production and didn't even have an adequate vacuum pump to produce an unsealed demonstrator. Starr's claim is also widely disputed as post-facto filing of someone else's idea. Not to imply that the American Patent Office makes a habit of encouraging such practices, then or now....

    Edison supporters [thomasedison.com] still claim that Edison received the first patent in 1879, ignoring Swan's UK patent in 1878 (they can't spell Humphrey Dav(e)y either).

    As for the trustworthiness of Edison's patent, then the US PTO themselves ruled it invalid in 1883, in favour of William Sawyer's claims.

    If you want more details on Joseph Swan, look in the archives of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle Upon Tyne. This is a private library, and still going (although my own membership has lapsed since I left Newcastle). Apart from demonstrations of Swan's work, it's also where Humphrey Davey first demonstrated the miner's safety lamp.

    I'd mention Edison's treatment of Tesla, but I wouldn't want you to think I'm one of those monomaniac loons that hangs around on the Net, slating Edison 8-)

  • Hang on a mo. From http://www.geocities.com/~anderberg/ ant/history/ [geocities.com]

    1961
    July
    Leonard Kleinrock publishes the first paper on packet switching networks: 'Information Flow in Large Communication Nets' while at MIT.

    Is this a paper based on Donald Davies earlier work, or a paper published almost at the same time and i'm getting confused?

  • Not many people can claim "I conceived the use of a purpose-designed network employing packet switching in which the stream of bits is broken up into short messages, or 'packets', that find their way individually to the destination, where they are reassembled into the original stream."

    Actually, Nobody can claim that, since I beleive Allan Konrad already holds the patent for that technology.

  • Here are a couple of sites you may be looking for.

    http://www.pbs.org/internet/timeline [pbs.org]
    http://www.geocities.com/~anderberg /ant/history [geocities.com]

  • Re:But, why would anyone want to say... (Score:3)

    by Detritus ( 11846 ) on Thursday June 01, 2000 @01:46AM (#1034394) Homepage
    The Internet is more than just a packet switched network. The idea that made it possible is the catenet (concatenated networks). See IEN 48 [isi.edu], The Catenet Model for Internetworking, Vint Cerf, 1978. The catenet model made it possible to build an Internet out of many incompatible and proprietary networks. Like the Borg, the catenet model could assimilate other networks, without discarding their hardware or software.

  • Worked with Turing after WWII (Score:3)

    by Cy Guy ( 56083 ) on Thursday June 01, 2000 @04:13AM (#1034395) Homepage Journal
    Per this Obit from The Times of London [the-times.co.uk], Davies worked with Alan Turing after the war to help build first ACE computer. Later in life he was an early advocate of security for networks, which he spent the last 20 years researching.

    Davies was also awarded the Royal honor of Commander of the British Empire (CBE), essentially one level short of knighthood, for his contributions to computing science.

  • A Pioneer is Lost (Score:3)

    by zpengo ( 99887 ) on Thursday June 01, 2000 @12:34AM (#1034396) Homepage
    This [thinkquest.org] Internet timeline mentions Davies as early as 1967. So does This [washington.edu] one. There are few people who could have claimed to have been around the Internet scene for as long as 37 years. Most people don't even realize that it goes back that far.

  • Internet Hall of Fame? (Score:3)

    by zpengo ( 99887 ) on Thursday June 01, 2000 @12:37AM (#1034397) Homepage
    I'm sure this is an idea that has already been attempted, but I've not yet seen it done well. Does anyone know of a good site, intended for a non-tech audience, that gives an accurate and thorough account of the history of the Internet?

    The few that I've seen make the mistake of considering the WWW and the Internet to be the same thing, and start things off with Berners-Lee. He's a celebrity, but he was standing on the shoulders of giants.

  • Re:what? no museum? pretty sad.. (Score:3)

    by Vanders ( 110092 ) on Thursday June 01, 2000 @12:52AM (#1034398) Homepage
    We know who invented TV, but few people know who invented the electron gun that it relies on

    This is another common misconception, that John Loggie Baird (sp?) invented modern television. His invention used a mechanical scanning disk, not an electron gun. The electron gun TV was a seperate invention (And i can't even name it's inventor off the top of my head). Baird still gets the credit for inventing TV, however.

    I'll stop being pedantic now...;)
  • Your post reminds me of the Isaac Asmiov series, Foundation where mankind in the future has colonised the galaxy, but it has taken so long that mankind has not only forgotten who pioneered space travel, but also the planet from which he had originated from.

    I don't think anyone can even remember the name of the person who invented paper and the first ink-based writing device. Unfortunately, that's how history works.

    But it is sad how in today's era of mass commercialism and consumerism, that any advances, especially technological ones, are eventually and pitifully reduced to a tacky marketable product all for the sake of a quick profit. This all but takes away the end-user's appreciation of the history, effort and time put into making the scientific and technological breakthroughs that were needed to overcome what seemed to be previously impassable barriers and limits.

    Those of us reading this article can only wonder how many failures and heartbreaks, and moments of near surrender pioneers have to endure just to make a breakthrough which will benefit humanity as a whole only to see it result in a tacky mass produced product that hardly anyone will remember you for. Mainstream society now consists of techno-peasants who only think about the enjoyment they are getting out of using whatever technology before them without bothering or wanting to appreciate how much blood, sweat and tears have gone into them; let alone how they truly work beneath a shiny colourful marketable veneer. All they really think about eagerly is how long before they can purchase the next feature-packed bloated version of their product and chuck out the old without though.

    IMHO: Perhaps Slashdot should take up the initiative and begin an Computing Hall of Fame, so that the pioneers of the ever so rapidly changing computer age, both past and present, be remembered in our lifetimes for helping bringing the world much, much closer together by those who truly appreciate them.

    D. W. Davies - I salute you. Thank you very, very much for all you've done for us all.

  • When I die, my last word will be (Score:3)

    by Dungeon Dweller ( 134014 ) on Thursday June 01, 2000 @02:34AM (#1034400)
    ACK
  • That's not _quite_ fair is it!

    Yes, we all know who invented the lightbulb, because a lightbulb is a very useful thing.

    We don't know who invented the technique to manufacture argon, or to create tungsten filament wire, or who figured out how to make a glass bulb that wouldn't shatter. All these were doubtless very important steps forward, but not in themselves useful.

    Was inventing packet-switching all that important? More important than inventing the blast furnace? More important than inventing fractional distillation?

    We know who invented TV, but few people know who invented the electron gun that it relies on, and few still the people who discovered the physical principles that the electron gun is based around.

    Fame has never been that strongly linked to importance...

  • My Condolences (Score:4)

    by Effugas ( 2378 ) on Thursday June 01, 2000 @01:16AM (#1034402) Homepage
    I give my condolences to the family, the friends, and the untold and uncountable engineers who Mr. Davies' work has influenced. I can only say that if it is the humble goal of all engineers to truly expand the knowledge and define the methods by which humanity seeks to function, then Mr. Davies truly succeeded to a degree that all of us can only aspire to reach.

    I didn't know him, but his work has directly influenced my life and my studies. (One of his more intriguing discoveries is referenced in my Signature!) To those who complain that others may have received more fame than he, I can only say that genuine impact is of greater value than any shallow fame, and that Mr. Davies truly contributed genuinely to the lives of myself, my coworkers, and each of you who may read this message.

    God speed, Donald Davies. You did well for yourself. Engineers throughout the world salute you, and your contributions.

    Goodbye.

    Yours Truly,

    Dan Kaminsky

  • But, why would anyone want to say... (Score:4)

    by Sir_Winston ( 107378 ) on Wednesday May 31, 2000 @11:50PM (#1034403)
    But, why would anyone want to say "I conceived the use of a purpose-designed network employing packet switching in which the stream of bits is broken up into short messages, or 'packets', that find their way individually to the destination, where they are reassembled into the original stream," when one could put it as simply and eloquently as Al Gore when he said "I invented the Internet"? :-)

    But seriously, it's sad whenever we lose one of the pioneers. Not too many people these days really know or understand that the Internet didn't just "materialize" in the mid-nineties, and so the pioneering work done by so many universities and by so many involved with Arpanet and Usenet gets ignored in the popular consciousness. If you tell the average Internet user that the roots of the Internet really go back at least to the sixties with the work that was being done at universities and in the government, they'll stare at you in disbelief. Or apathy...

  • what? no museum? pretty sad.. (Score:4)

    by QuantumRiff ( 120817 ) on Wednesday May 31, 2000 @11:57PM (#1034404)
    invent a light bulb, get a museum and lots of credit, (even though other kinds of street lights were used before) Develop a small, cheap method of transportation, which has caused sprawl, pollution, gridlock, drunk driving deaths, and a small feeling of personal freedom, go down in the annals of history. Kill 6 million people on the basis of their religion, and everyone knows your name. Invent the basis of the future, the foundation from which business, commerce, and information can freely pass, a basis from which undoubtedly every is touched, directly or indirectly, and people say "who?"

    I'll bet 95% of the people who read this will know exactly who the first 3 are, but until this article, didn't even know that the fourth person existed.

    Such a sad, over sensationalized world we live in!

    ------------------------------------------
    If God Droppd Acid, Would he see People???

  • Re:But, why would anyone want to say... (Score:5)

    by BrianH ( 13460 ) on Thursday June 01, 2000 @12:04AM (#1034405)
    Too true. A few months back I was explaining some of the basics of the Internet to some prospective clients when one of them asked me how long I'd been using it. I told him that I'd first used the Internet in 1989 and that I'd used the Web since mid-1994. Out of nowhere one of the clients looked at me and said "You're lying, the Internet wasn't even invented until 1995!"

    I was honestly to stunned to even reply for a good 30 seconds. When I did try to correct him, he immediately got defensive and insinuated that I was trying to pull something over on them. When I finally chuckled and said "And I'll bet you think Microsoft invented the Internet", he looked at me in all seriousness and said "No. AOL did."

    Needless to say, I didn't get the contract. In retrospect, that was probably a good thing :)

  • D.W. Davies contributions (Score:5)

    by javaDragon ( 187973 ) on Thursday June 01, 2000 @12:02AM (#1034406) Homepage
    D.W. Davies left a strong trace inside the core of our internet world, his name can even be found in RFCs.

    First, his contribution to the creation of the Internet :

    RFC243 and RFC290 (bibliography) :

    D. W. Davies, "Communication Networks to Serve Rapid-response
    Computers," Proc IFIP Congress 68, p. 650-656, August 1968.

    D. W. Davies, "The Principles of a Data Communication Network for
    Computers and Remote Peripherals," Proc IFIP Congress 68, p. 709-714,
    August 1968.

    RFC2235 (Internet Timeline) :

    1967
    ACM Symposium on Operating Principles
    - Plan presented for a packet-switching network
    - First design paper on ARPANET published by Lawrence G. Roberts

    National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in Middlesex, England develops
    NPL Data Network under D. W. Davies

    Second, contributions concerning security :

    RFC1750 (randomness generation) :

    [...] It has been shown by Donald W. Davies that this sort of shifted partial output feedback significantly weakens an algorithm compared will feeding all of the output bits back as input. In particular, for DES, repeated encrypting a full 64 bit quantity will give an expected repeat in about 2^63 iterations. Feeding back anything less than 64 (and more than 0) bits will give an expected repeat in between 2**31 and 2**32 iterations!
    [...]

    RFC2025 (public key mechanism, bibliography) :

    [Davi89]: D. W. Davies and W. L. Price, "Security for Computer
    Networks", Second Edition, John Wiley and Sons, New York, 1989.

Slashdot Top Deals

FORTUNE'S FUN FACTS TO KNOW AND TELL: A black panther is really a leopard that has a solid black coat rather then a spotted one.

Close