packet switching

The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control

by Jacob Siegel  · 24 Mar 2026  · 348pp  · 103,246 words

could be sent through the network in any order and then reassembled at their endpoint to re-create the original message. The method, known as packet switching, proved essential in building the Internet and is still how most digital communication works. A year after Licklider left ARPA, Robert Taylor arrived. Like Licklider

The Best of 2600: A Hacker Odyssey

by Emmanuel Goldstein  · 28 Jul 2008  · 889pp  · 433,897 words

Telenet (February, 1984) Telenet. Or, to be more specific, GTE Telenet. A massive network formed by the people and technology that were used to develop packet switching for the Department of Defense. Telenet was purchased by GTE in 1979 and has been growing in size and revenue ever since. There are quite

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computer to a bulletin board in California and not have to pay for a long-distance call. The “computer conversation” goes through GTE Telenet, a packet-switching network for computers, previously used exclusively by large corporations. “To access the service,” GTE’s press release explains, “a user calls his PC Pursuit access

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purpose as a telecommunications information source. One recurring topic was TASI (Time Assignment Speech Interpolation), a method of transmitting satellite conversations. TASI is only the packet switching of telephone conversations, where the conversation is converted into small packets and 189 94192c06.qxd 6/3/08 3:31 PM Page 190 190 Chapter

The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

by Walter Isaacson  · 6 Oct 2014  · 720pp  · 197,129 words

circuit, or microchip. 1959 Noyce and Fairchild colleagues independently invent microchip. 1960 J. C. R. Licklider publishes “Man-Computer Symbiosis.” Paul Baran at RAND devises packet switching. 1961 President Kennedy proposes sending man to the moon. 1962 MIT hackers create Spacewar game. Licklider becomes founding director of ARPA’s Information Processing Techniques

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so. 1966 Stewart Brand hosts Trips Festival with Ken Kesey. Bob Taylor convinces ARPA chief Charles Herzfeld to fund ARPANET. Donald Davies coins the term packet switching. 1967 ARPANET design discussions in Ann Arbor and Gatlinburg. 1968 Larry Roberts sends out request for bids to build the ARPANET’s IMPs. Noyce and

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the talk, Larry Roberts and others gathered around Scantlebury to learn more, then moved on to the bar to discuss it late into the night. PACKET SWITCHING: PAUL BARAN, DONALD DAVIES, AND LEONARD KLEINROCK There are many ways of sending data through a network. The simplest, known as circuit switching, is the

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into the network, and then passed along from node to node as it wends its way to its destination. An even more efficient method is packet switching, a special type of store-and-forward switching in which the messages are broken into bite-size units of the exact same size, called packets

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-four separate speakers to describe the entire system,” Baran marveled. When it was over, the AT&T executives asked Baran, “Now do you see why packet switching wouldn’t work?” To their great disappointment, Baran simply replied, “No.” Once again, AT&T was stymied by the innovator’s dilemma. It balked at

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of the Internet by asserting that, in his PhD thesis and his paper proposing it (both written after Baran began formulating packet switching at RAND), he had “developed the basic principles of packet switching” and “the mathematical theory of packet networks, the technology underpinning the Internet.”65 Beginning in the mid-1990s, he began

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to be recognized “as the Father of Modern Data Networking.”66 He claimed in a 1996 interview, “My dissertation laid out the basic principles for packet switching.”67 This led to an outcry among many of the other Internet pioneers, who publicly attacked Kleinrock and said that his brief mention of breaking

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messages into smaller pieces did not come close to being a proposal for packet switching. “Kleinrock is a prevaricator,” said Bob Taylor. “His claim to have anything to do with the invention of packet switching is typical incorrigible self-promotion, which he has been guilty of from day one.”68 (Countered

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published posthumously that attacked Kleinrock in surprisingly strong terms. “The work of Kleinrock before and up to 1964 gives him no claim to have originated packet switching,” Davies wrote after an exhaustive analysis. “The passage in his book on time-sharing queue discipline, if pursued to a conclusion, might have led him

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to packet switching, but it did not. . . . I can find no evidence that he understood the principles of packet switching.”70 Alex McKenzie, an engineer who managed BBN’s network control center, would later be even more

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collegial attitude of the Internet pioneers had been shattered by Kleinrock’s claim of priority for the concept of packet switching. Paul Baran, who did deserve to be known as the father of packet switching, came forward to say that “the Internet is really the work of a thousand people,” and he pointedly declared

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an aberration,” he added, referring disparagingly to Kleinrock.72 Interestingly, until the mid-1990s Kleinrock had credited others with coming up with the idea of packet switching. In a paper published in November 1978, he cited Baran and Davies as pioneers of the concept: “In the early 1960’s, Paul Baran had

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. As late as 1990 he was still declaring that Baran was the first to conceive of packet switching: “I would credit him [Baran] with the first ideas.”74 However, when Kleinrock’s 1979 paper was reprinted in 2002, he wrote a new introduction

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that claimed, “I developed the underlying principles of packet switching, having published the first paper on the subject in 1961.”75 In fairness to Kleinrock, whether or not he had claimed that his work in

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the early 1960s devised packet switching, he would have been (and still should be) accorded great respect as an Internet pioneer. He was indisputably an important early theorist of data flow

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more likely to launch a preemptive strike if it feared that its communications and ability to respond would not survive an attack. “The origin of packet switching is very much Cold War,” he said. “I got very interested in the subject of how the hell you build a reliable command and control

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just to improve the productivity of the researchers. That rationale would just not have been strong enough. What was strong enough was this idea that packet switching would be more survivable, more robust under damage to a network. . . . In a strategic situation—meaning a nuclear attack—the president could still communicate to

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“Final Report” by the National Science Foundation in 1995 declared, “An outgrowth of the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, the ARPANET’s packet-switching scheme was meant to provide reliable communications in the face of nuclear attack.”85 So which view is correct? In this case, both are. For

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that would be sent to each research center to serve as the routers, or Interface Message Processors, of the proposed ARPANET. His plan incorporated the packet-switching concept of Paul Baran and Donald Davies, the suggestion for standardized IMPs proposed by Wes Clark, the theoretical insights of J. C. R. Licklider, Les

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written to celebrate the occasion. Cerf performed a parody of Shakespeare, titled “Rosencrantz and Ethernet,” that raised to a Hamlet-like question the choice between packet switching and dedicated circuits: All the world’s a net! And all the data in it merely packets come to store-and-forward in the queues

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Hochfelder, Oct. 24, 1999, IEEE History Center; Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma (Harper, 1997). 58. Donald Davies, “A Historical Study of the Beginnings of Packet Switching,” Computer Journal, British Computer Society, 2001; Abbate, Inventing the Internet, 558; author’s interview with Larry Roberts; Trevor Harris, “Who Is the Father of the

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is quoted in Peter Salus, Casting the Net (Addison-Wesley, 1995), 52: “I was the first to discuss the performance gains to be had by packet switching.” 68. Author’s interview with Taylor. 69. Author’s interview with Kleinrock. 70. Donald Davies, “A Historical Study of the Beginnings of

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Packet Switching,” Computer Journal, British Computer Society, 2001. 71. Alex McKenzie, “Comments on Dr. Leonard Kleinrock’s Claim to Be ‘the Father of Modern Data Networking,’ ” Aug.

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message units,” Roberts told me in 2014. However, like Kleinrock, Roberts had previously given primary credit for packet switching to Baran. Roberts wrote in 1978, “The first published description of what we now call packet switching was an 11-volume analysis, On Distributed Communications, prepared by Paul Baran of the RAND Corporation in August

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1964.” See Lawrence Roberts, “The Evolution of Packet Switching,” Proceedings of the IEEE, Nov. 1978. 76. Paul Baran oral history, “How the Web Was Won,” Vanity Fair, July 2008. 77. Paul Baran interview, by

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ballistic missiles, ref1, ref2 Ballmer, Steve, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Bally Midway, ref1, ref2, ref3 Baran, Paul, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 packet-switching suggested by, ref1 Bardeen, John, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 in dispute with Shockley, ref1, ref2, ref3 Nobel Prize won by, ref1 photovoltaic

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, ref1, ref2 Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, ref1, ref2 Kleinrock, Leonard, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 background of, ref1 on nuclear survivability, ref1 packet switching and, ref1 Kline, Charley, ref1 K-Model, ref1, ref2 Knox, Dillwyn “Dilly,” ref1 Kotok, Alan, ref1, ref2 Kovitz, Ben, ref1 Kubrick, Stanley, ref1, ref2 Kun

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.S. Army, ref1, ref2 O’Reilly, Tim, ref1, ref2 O’Reilly Media, ref1, ref2 oscillators, ref1 Osculometer, ref1 Packard, Dave, ref1, ref2, ref3 packets, ref1 packet switching, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Kleinrock’s taking credit for, ref1 Page, Carl, ref1 Page, Larry, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Google founded by

Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions

by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths  · 4 Apr 2016  · 523pp  · 143,139 words

needed to be responsible for solving their own communication issues. These machine-to-machine problems—and their solutions—at once mimic and illuminate our own. Packet Switching What we now think of as “the Internet” is actually a collection of many protocols, but the chief among them (so much so that it

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went away and, with others, developed this technology which ate their lunch. The technology that ate circuit switching’s lunch would become known as packet switching. In a packet-switched network, rather than using a dedicated channel for each connection, senders and receivers atomize their messages into tiny shards known as “packets,” and merge

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Mail doesn’t need to know about that.… They just deliver the letters.” Efficient use of bandwidth wasn’t the only consideration driving research into packet switching in the 1960s; the other was nuclear war. Paul Baran at the RAND Corporation was trying to solve the problem of network robustness, so that

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: that very stability meant that a dropped call stayed dropped. Circuit switching just wasn’t flexible or adaptable enough to be robust. And here, too, packet switching could offer just what the times were calling for. In circuit-switched networks, a call fails if any one of its links gets disrupted—which

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means that reliability goes down exponentially as a network grows larger. In packet switching, on the other hand, the proliferation of paths in a growing network becomes a virtue: there are now that many more ways for data to

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flow, so the reliability of the network increases exponentially with its size. Still, as Van Jacobson tells it, even after packet switching was devised, the phone companies were unimpressed. “All the telco people said, with very loud voices, that’s not a network! That’s just a

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paths that we create! And you’re putting a lot of extra gunk on it so that you use it really inefficiently.” But from a packet-switching point of view, the phone wires are just a means to an end; the sender and receiver don’t actually care how the packets get

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delivered. The ability to operate agnostically over any number of diverse media would be packet switching’s great virtue. After early networks in the late ’60s and early ’70s, such as the ARPANET, proved the viability of the concept, networks of

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all types began sprouting across the country, doing packet switching not only over copper phone wires, but over satellites and over radio. In 2001, a group of computer scientists in the Norwegian city of Bergen

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briefly even implemented a packet-switching network over “Avian Carriers”—that is, packets written down on paper and tied to pigeons’ feet. Of course, packet switching would not be without its own problems. For starters, one of the first questions for any

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must constantly confront the possibility that the call has dropped, and constantly offer reassurances that it has not. This, too, is the anxiety of all packet-switching protocols, indeed of any medium rooted in asynchronous turn-taking—be it letter writing, texting, or the tentative back-and-forths of online dating. Every

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together the university’s seven campuses and many research institutes, spread across four islands and hundreds of miles. He hit upon the idea of implementing packet switching via radio rather than the phone system, connecting the islands with a loose chain of transmitters and receivers. This system would come to be known

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?” he wondered. “This thing was working on smaller-scale tests, and then it suddenly fell apart.” One of the biggest differences between circuit switching and packet switching emerges in how they deal with congestion. In circuit switching, the system either approves a channel request, or denies it outright if the request cannot

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tried using a phone system during some peak time, you may have encountered the “special information tone” and message proclaiming that “all circuits are busy.” Packet switching is radically different. The phone system gets full; the mail system gets slow. There’s nothing in the network to explicitly tell a sender how

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the crêpe stand once the line gets too long would be a version of Tail Drop in a human context.) Given the postal metaphor for packet switching, it might seem a bit odd to imagine a mail carrier who simply vaporizes every parcel that doesn’t fit onto the truck that morning

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never turn a sender away, and for better or worse we got one. Indeed, over the past fifteen years, the move from circuit switching to packet switching has played itself out across society. We used to request dedicated circuits with others; now we send them packets and wait expectantly for ACKs. We

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Way to Look at Networking.” “So little boy went away”: Kleinrock, “Computing Conversations.” would become known as packet switching: The term “packet switching” comes from Donald W. Davies of the National Physical Laboratory, another key contributor to packet switching research at the time. “a consensual illusion between the two endpoints”: Stuart Cheshire, personal interview, February 26

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this point, and a broader reflection on the history of networking (including its current problems), see Jacobson, “A New Way to Look at Networking.” a packet-switching network over “Avian Carriers”: See Waitzman, A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers, Waitzman, IP Over Avian Carriers with Quality of

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Organizing from the Inside Out (Morgenstern) Ortega y Gasset, José outcome, process vs. overfitting packet acknowledgment. See also acknowledgment packets (ACKs) packet drops packet routing packet switching page faults page views, measuring Palmer, T. H. Papadimitriou, Christos Papworth, Neil parasites parking lots parking meters parking spot hunt Pascal, Blaise password failures pecking

VoIP Telephony with Asterisk

by Unknown  · 8 Mar 2011  · 247pp  · 62,845 words

distance Gateway Telemarketing Block Standalone Voicemail System Many of the world's largest telephone companies have committed to replacing their existing circuit switched systems with packet switched voice over IP systems. Many phone companies are alread transporting a significant portion of their traffic with IP. Many calls made over telephone compan equipment

Talk Is Cheap: Switching to Internet Telephones

by James E. Gaskin  · 15 Mar 2005  · 731pp  · 134,263 words

in the late 1970s were bits, at least to a study by the Department of Defense. Their own widely publicized report said clearly that a packet switched network, supporting packetized voice traffic, would be cheaper than circuit switched voice, the only technology in place at that time. Bits are bits, and 30

How We Got Here: A Slightly Irreverent History of Technology and Markets

by Andy Kessler  · 13 Jun 2005  · 218pp  · 63,471 words

coke ovens. The need for precision weapons would both directly and indirectly launch the digital revolution: Transistors in 1948, lasers and integrated circuits in 1958, packet switching in 1964 and microprocessors in 1970, and that was just the easy stuff. Using Edison effect tubes and relays and other forms of logic and

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, Leonard Kleinrock at MIT proposed a PhD thesis called “Information Flow in Large Communication Nets,” and this provided the theory and proof for packet switching, although it wasn’t called packet switching, not yet, and it was still a theory. The North American Aerospace Defense Command or NORAD was in charge of early warning

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’t think he ever said it, in fact I’m not sure who did (I got it, appropriately, off the Internet), but it is revealing: "Packet switching is the breaking down of data into datagrams or packets that are labeled to indicate the origin and the destination of the information and the

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a collection of computers hooked together via packet switching, which turned into ARPANET. ARPA put out a request for proposals, the infamous RFP, for Interface Message Processors or IMPs, which would be the store

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a 50-kilobit per second connection that AT&T provided. One can imagine that AT&T was not at all enthusiastic about the project, since packet switching endangered the phone network. But there was probably pressure to act patriotically - plus the government paid good money. Leonard Kleinrock, the MIT theorizer, of course

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on the face of those 10 AT&T execuhumps, and they merrily skipped back to HQ singing the stillbirth of packet switching. Of course, they were right for another 30 years, but packet switching would eventually be trouble for circuit-switched phone networks. With the success of its network, ARPA became DARPA, to remind

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of PARC until July 1976 when Metcalfe and Boggs published a paper in the Communications of the Association of Computer Machinery magazine, name “Ethernet: Distributed Packet Switching for Local Computer Networks.” The name Ethernet stuck. In the paper, they described their CSMA/CD scheme, Carrier Sense Multiple Access/Collision Detection. Local area

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with dreamy scientists sipping lattes, each resting comfortably in red, green and blue beanbag chairs. It’s good to know that some things never change. Packet switching, or connectionless connections, is more expensive than a point-to-point circuit, at first. But over time, the shrink and integrate learning curve kicks in

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, and the cost of packet switching plummets and the benefits swamp the old way of doing things. Finally, in 2001, the business of switching telephone calls died. Worldcom and Global Crossing

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took the whole voice signal and switched it from one wire to another to complete the call. Then packet switching came in, at first to prevent the vulnerability of a nuclear attack. But then packet switching took off, as the most efficient method to handle voice calls, data packets and the transport of Web

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pages. Packet switching is entirely electrical - a switch SOFTWARE AND NETWORKS 155 or router looks at the header of each packet and decides where to send it. But

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its implementation. *** The need for precision weapons would both directly and indirectly launch the digital revolution: transistors in 1948, lasers and integrated circuits in 1958, packet switching in 1964 and microprocessors in 1970, and that was just the easy stuff. Computers were invented to help win World War II. John von Neumann

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it or not, conflict sparked invention. Ask Wilkinson and Watt. So now, most of the piece parts are in place. Logic and memory in microprocessors. Packet switching to break up pipes and routers to move these packets around. Fiber optics with information carried on photons. And radios that can carry packets of

Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems

by Martin Kleppmann  · 17 Apr 2017

datacenter networks and the internet use packet switching? The answer is that they are optimized for bursty traffic. A circuit is good for an audio or video call, which needs to transfer a

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the rate of data transfer to the available network capacity. There have been some attempts to build hybrid networks that support both circuit switching and packet switching, such as ATM.iii InfiniBand has some similarities [35]: it implements end-to-end flow control at the link layer, which reduces the need for

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total ordering, 493 total order broadcast, 348-352 Orleans (actor framework), 139 outliers (response time), 14 Oz (programming language), 504 P package managers, 428, 505 packet switching, 285 packets corruption of, 306 sending via UDP, 442 PageRank (algorithm), 49, 424 paging (see virtual memory) ParAccel (database), 93 parallel databases (see massively parallel

Open Standards and the Digital Age: History, Ideology, and Networks (Cambridge Studies in the Emergence of Global Enterprise)

by Andrew L. Russell  · 27 Apr 2014  · 675pp  · 141,667 words

data networks based on the X.25 standard produced by the International Telecommunications Union. These foes proved to be too powerful for the packet-switched researchers. In 1976, the packet-switching research community splintered into two groups: one inspired by the French computer scientists Louis Pouzin and Hubert Zimmermann, and the other funded by

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the social and organizational foundations of these heretofore distinct industries. Through the late 1980s, Strassburg continued to insist that the commercial applications of new technologies – “packet switching, satellite communications, fiber optics, microwave, cellular radio, and other technologies having a variety of new service potentials” – could only be realized through “coordinated planning

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and Baran worked in radically different political economies. Davies, a research scientist in Britain’s prestigious national laboratory, emphasized the scientific and technical virtues of packet switching as a more efficient mode of data communication. Baran, in contrast, worked for RAND, the American Cold War think tank. His publications famously emphasized

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scientific community.”33 The affiliation with IFIP further energized and emboldened the researchers in INWG. They sensed a real opportunity to influence international standards for packet switching because, as the British computer scientist Donald Davies noted to INWG members in late 1972, “almost all the [CCITT] work was, in fact, concerned

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with circuit switching.”34 As we will see, however, leading members of CCITT’s packet-switching projects were suspicious of INWG’s affiliation with IFIP. The French telecommunication engineer Rémi Déspres, for example, later noted that IFIP “was a largely academic

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, Canadian researcher Dave McLimont prepared a “Thinkpiece” that he planned to submit to CCITT to stimulate discussion on “the procedure for the interworking of packet switching networks.” McLimont used a recent paper by Cerf and Kahn (circulated in September 1973 as INWG 39, and subsequently published in the IEEE Transactions on

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became entrepreneurs and viewed the CCITT process as the best way to ensure that their start-up company, Telenet, would profit from government investments in packet-switching research. Neither Roberts nor Wessler were unshakable advocates of either virtual circuit or datagram service; their interest, rather, was to get a standard in

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, and a Meaningless Consensus An energetic mix of collaboration and competition emerged with INWG researchers during 1973, as those who had been working independently on packet-switching experiments in the United States, France, and England exchanged ideas, met in person, refined their designs, and continued to build implementations.56 At the

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an outline of an alternative Host-Host protocol that was being developed in Cyclades. The next March, Pouzin published INWG 60, “A Proposal for Interconnecting Packet Switching Networks,” in which he introduced the term “Catenet” to describe “an aggregate of networks [that] behave as a single logical network.”59 One month

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1975) and did not have good news to report. Delegates at the May meeting, he wrote in INWG 97, “were cool about packet switching … they do not object to packet switching, as long as it looks just like circuit switching.” His conclusion was equally blunt: “It does not appear realistic to expect comprehensive CCITT

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international standards setting. He and his colleagues had failed to convince the bureaucrats in the monopoly-dominated CCITT to consider a datagram option for their packet-switching standards. Even worse, Cerf had been unable to convince his peers in INWG that the Arpanet’s protocol design was superior to the Cyclades-

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sage of datagrams himself. INWG member John Day summarized the significance of Pouzin’s technical work, suggesting that the conventional wisdom about the “invention” of packet-switching and internetworking is incomplete without reference to Pouzin and the young cohort of computer researchers whom he inspired: The real breakthrough in networking is not

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packet switching (Baran and Davies independently), but datagram packet switching (Pouzin). I have always found it somewhat interesting that every project Baran and Larry Roberts have been involved in since the ARPANet

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connectionless ones. Interestingly enough, what is seen as revolutionary seems to depend on age cohort. For the older group where communication was based on telecom, packet switching is revolutionary. Sending data in small packets rather than as a continuous stream. But for the slightly younger group (and the shift is sudden) schooled

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Weekly (February 16, 1976), 8. 44 Sirbu and Zwimpfer, “The Case of X.25,” 36–37; Abbate, Inventing the Internet, 149; Tony Rybczynski, “Commercialization of Packet Switching (1975–1985): A Canadian Perspective,” IEEE Communications Magazine (December 2009): 26–32; Rémi Déspres, “X.25 Virtual Circuits – Transpac in France – Pre-Internet Data Networking

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2012, Paris, France. Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis; Pouzin interview, Charles Babbage Institute. 46 Déspres, “X.25 Virtual Circuits.” 47 Rybczynski, “Commercialization of Packet Switching,” 26–31; Déspres, “X.25 Virtual Circuits”; Sirbu and Zwimpfer, “The Case of X.25,” 37–41; Abbate, Inventing the Internet, 152–161; Valérie Schafer

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, “Circuits Virtuels et Datagrammes: Une Concurrence à Plusieurs Échelles,” Histoire, Économie & Société 26 (2007): 29–48. 48 Rybczynski, “Commercialization of Packet Switching,” 26; Déspres interview, Charles Babbage Institute; Marc E. Levilion, oral history interview by Andrew L. Russell, April 2, 2012, Paris, France. Charles Babbage Institute, University

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Network Business – Monopolies and Entrepreneurs,” (n.d. 1976), INWG Legal/Political Note 6, McKenzie Collection. 56 Abbate, Inventing the Internet, 124–127; Valérie Schafer, “Appropriating Packet Switching Networks, Making Cyclades Network: The Threat of American Dominance in the 1970s and the French Answer through Cyclades,” courtesy of the author. 57 At first

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and Robert Kahn, “HOST and PROCESS Level Protocols for Internetwork Communication,” September 13, 1973, INWG 39, McKenzie Collection. 59 Louis Pouzin, “A Proposal for Interconnecting Packet Switching Networks,” March 1974, INWG 60, McKenzie Collection. On “Catenet,” see also Vint Cerf, “The Catenet Model for Internetworking,” July 1978, Internet Engineering Note 48,

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août 2006; Alain Beltran and Pascal Griset, “Le Projet Cyclades Sacrifié,” Codesource 11 (2007): 1; Nora and Minc, The Computerization of Society; Valérie Schafer, “Appropriating Packet Switching Networks, Making Cyclades Network”; Schafer, La France en Reseaux; Després interview, Charles Babbage Institute; Pouzin interview, Charles Babbage Institute. 87 Vint Cerf, quoted in Ian

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: “The utility that a subscriber derives from a communication service increases as others join the system.”2 Rohlfs theorized and mathematized the lessons that the packet-switching researchers we met in Chapter 6 – such as Louis Pouzin, Vinton Cerf, Robert Kahn, Rémi Déspres, and Marc Levilion – understood intuitively: the value of

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digital computer-communication network would reside primarily in its ability to facilitate and sustain interconnections on an ever-increasing scale. As we have seen, these packet-switching researchers gained firsthand experience with the obstacles that prevented the universal adoption of new standards for data networking. As the “virtual circuit versus datagram” controversy

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tolerated greater institutional and technological diversity as well as a more competitive computer manufacturing industry that did not feature one national champion. As a result, packet-switching experiments flourished under the leadership of Derek Barber and Donald Davies in the prestigious National Physical Laboratory, and a variety of small companies scrambled to

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autocratic and centralized origins. Internet Protocols and Institutional Evolution, 1975–1992 By the mid-1970s, Vint Cerf was deeply enmeshed in the international community of packet-switching researchers. He was the energetic chairman of the International Network Working Group (INWG) and a regular correspondent and collaborator with European networking experts such as

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Russell, Andrew L. “Modularity: An Interdisciplinary History of an Ordering Concept.” Information & Culture: A Journal of History 47 (2012): 257–287. Rybczynski, Tony. “Commercialization of Packet Switching (1975–1985): A Canadian Perspective.” IEEE Communications Magazine (December 2009), 26–32. Saloner, Garth. “Economic Issues in Computer Interface Standardization.” Economics of Innovation and New

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Committee (CCITT) creation of 172 datagram service versus virtual circuit service 177–178, 179, 180 generally 24 INWG and 173 OSI and 219–220, 221 packet-switching and 186 Recommendations 172–173 standardization and 177, 254, 274 X.25 standard 13, 177, 178–182, 192, 198 International Telegraph Union 36 Internet

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, 258 Organizational synthesis 264 Orton, William 31 OSI. See Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Company 119 Pack, Robert 117 Packet Communications 176 Packet-switching 167–168, 186 Padlipsky, Michael A. 243, 245 Parsons, Frank 28, 33, 34–35 Parsons, Talcott 10 Pelkey, James 187 Phillips, Charles 150, 151

Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet

by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon  · 1 Jan 1996  · 352pp  · 96,532 words

goals—arrived at virtually the same revolutionary idea for a new kind of communications network. The realization of their concepts came to be known as packet-switching. Paul Baran was a good-humored immigrant from Eastern Europe. He was born in 1926, in what was then Poland. His parents sought refuge in

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that year, he was at MIT. He then returned to England, rose swiftly at the NPL, and in 1966, after describing his pioneering work on packet-switching, he was appointed head of the computer science division. The technical similarity between Davies’ and Baran’s work was striking. Not only were their ideas

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, like Baran’s, but different in detail. There was just one major difference in their approaches. The motivation that led Davies to conceive of a packet-switching network had nothing to do with the military concerns that had driven Baran. Davies simply wanted to create a new public communications network. He wanted

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his lab to confirm that there were cognates in other languages. When they reported back that it was a good choice, he fixed on it. Packet-switching. It was precise, economic, and very British. And it was far easier on the ear than Baran’s “distributed adaptive message block switching.” Davies met

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arrived at the Pentagon, he knew Donald Davies from his trip to London the previous year, but didn’t know about Davies’ subsequent work in packet switching. And he had never heard the name Paul Baran. A few years earlier, Roberts had decided that computing was getting old and everything worth doing

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who would recognize an interesting project when they saw it. The conversation with Scantlebury had clarified several points for Roberts. The Briton’s comments about packet-switching in particular helped steer Roberts closer to a detailed design. In specifying the network requirements, Roberts was guided by a few basic principles. First, the

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about how difficult building the IMPs would be. Heart encountered any number of skeptics—phone company people and academicians mostly—who didn’t believe a packet-switching network would work. Building the hardware wasn’t really the hard part, they argued; rather, making it all work together—the systems part—was the

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small company. The members of BBN’s team knew there was a lot riding on them now. If the IMPs didn’t work, networking and packet-switching would fall into the oblivion of failed experiments. Some people—other bidders mostly—expressed astonishment that little BBN had won the contract. “This kind of

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and whole, than it was to the other team members, involved as they were in the actual programming and wiring of its many parts. The packet-switching concept opened a rich universe in which a theoretically oriented and trained engineer like Kahn could investigate a wide range of hypothetical scenarios. Kahn’s

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, because you couldn’t actually trace it. What to do now? The Honeywell 516 had never been used in an application as demanding as the packet-switching network. It was a fast machine; the IMP Guys had chosen it precisely for its I/O capabilities. No one else was likely ever to

…

“at least understood what we were saying.” Under normal conditions, the 516 would run for years without experiencing the synchronizer problem. However, under ARPA’s packet-switching network conditions, the machine was failing once every day or so. Try telling Frank Heart, Mr. Reliability, that he’d just have to live with

…

which ARPA went about its business and its relationship with its contractor worked too. Above all, the esoteric concept on which the entire enterprise turned—packet-switching—worked. The predictions of utter failure were dead wrong. 6 Hacking Away and Hollering The network was real, but with only four nodes clustered on

…

, and remote diagnostics tests continued to occupy the BBN team on a daily basis, week in and week out, leading to steady improvements in their packet-switching technology. The Network Control Center kept expanding with the network. Pressure to maintain the network grew. It became a steady part of ARPA’s contract

…

, your work was in artificial intelligence or robotics or computer graphics or almost anything else the community was investigating, the utility of this grand transcontinental packet-switching system had yet to be realized. No one had come up with a useful demonstration of resource-sharing; the protocols to make it work weren

…

networking community in the U.S. at that point,” observed Kahn. Not to mention the international community, for even Donald Davies, father of the term “packet-switching,” had come over from England to see how this would all work out. “It was just an amazing experience,” said Vint Cerf. “Hacking away and

…

went down. The phone company executives’first reaction was to laugh. “I looked up in pain,” said Metcalfe, “and I caught them smiling, delighted that packet-switching was flaky. This I will never forget. It confirmed for them that circuit-switching technology was here to stay, and this

…

packet-switching stuff was an unreliable toy that would never have much impact in the commercial world, and now they could go home to New Jersey. It

…

the luckless Metcalfe and the failed demo, the AT&T executives would have seen the exuberance in other corners of the room. Not only did packet-switching work but it made wondrous things possible. Some of the most ingenious demonstrations involved English-language conversational programs. These were elaborate programs constructed to engage

…

half days. Executives, engineers, and technicians from the telecommunications and computer industries, a good number of them, entered the room skeptical of the ARPANET and packet-switching. Many left believing the technology might be real after all. For the most part, the forty-odd terminals worked, the resources were engaging, the TIP

…

disbelieving that airplanes could really fly until they actually saw one in flight,” said Kahn. The ICCC demonstration did more to establish the viability of packet-switching than anything else before it. As a result, the ARPANET community gained a much larger sense of itself, its technology, and the resources at its

…

a time of intense experimentation with computer networking. A few people were beginning to think about new kinds of packet networks. The basic principles of packet-switching were unlikely to be improved upon dramatically. And the protocols, interfaces, and routing algorithms for handling messages were growing more refined. One area still to

…

computers. Why not do something still more challenging: devise small portable computer “sites” carried around in vehicles or even by hand, linked together in a packet-switching network? In 1972 Roberts outlined the scheme. He envisioned a network in which a central minicomputer situated in a powerful radio station would communicate with

…

1972 ICCC demonstration in Washington, the leaders of several national networking projects had formed an International Network Working Group (INWG), with Vint Cerf in charge. Packet-switching network projects in France and England were producing favorable results. Donald Davies’s work at the U.K.’s National Physical Laboratory was coming along

…

had attended the ICCC demonstration in Washington. “The spirit after ICCC,” said Alex McKenzie, BBN’s representative to the INWG, “was, ‘We’ve shown that packet-switching really works nationally. Let’s take the lead in creating an international network of networks.’” Larry Roberts was enthusiastic about INWG because he wanted to

…

him to run a new subsidiary called TELENET (not to be confused with Telnet, the program for remote log-ins), which would market a private packet-switching service. Now unable to recommend a sale by the government to TELENET, Roberts arranged to have the ARPANET transferred temporarily to the Defense Communications Agency

…

-A batteries were to portable radios. A battle of sorts was forming along familiar lines, recalling the confrontation between AT&T and the inventors of packet-switching during the birth of ARPANET. On the OSI side stood entrenched bureaucracy, with a strong we-know best attitude, patronizing and occasionally contemptuous. “There was

…

market for routers—of which IMPs were the progenitors. BBN failed to see the potential in routers much as AT&T had refused to acknowledge packet-switching. Anyone wanting to connect a local area network—of which there were now hundreds of thousands—to the Internet needed a router. By 1994, the

…

Kahn for the invention of internetworking . . . Failing that, I’ll see if I can smile my way into the group photo of the inventors of packet-switching.” Weeks and days before the event, BBN’s public relations firm placed stories in magazines and newspapers. Newsweek ran a lengthy piece on the ARPANET

…

own dreamy way. In the years following the IMP project, Crowther pursued some unusual ideas about natural language processing, and worked extensively on high-speed packet-switching technology. Severo Ornstein had left BBN in the 1970s for Xerox PARC, and while there he started Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. When he retired

…

based on personal interviews with Baran, as well as various interviews conducted by the Babbage Institute. The description of Donald Davies’s early work on packet-switching is based on interviews and correspondence with Donald Davies, and on Martin Campbell-Kelly’s articles and interviews. Arthur Norberg and Judy O’Neill’s

…

Symposium at UCLA in 1989. Bibliography Books Alexander, Charles C. Holding the Line: The Eisenhower Era, 1952–1961. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975. Baran, Paul.“Packet Switching.” In Fundamentals of Digital Switching. 2d ed. Edited by John C. McDonald. New York: Plenum Press, 1990. Barry, John A. Technobabble. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991

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Report.” Communications of the ACM, October 1983. Crowther, W. R., F. E. Heart, A. A. McKenzie, J. M. McQuillan, and D. C. Walden.“Issues in Packet Switching Networking Design.” Proceedings of the 1975 National Computer Conference, 1975. Denning, Peter J. “The Science of Computing: The ARPANET After Twenty Years.” American Scientist, November

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Network: Internet Links UNIX Computers Worldwide.” InfoWorld, 25 April 1988. Hines, William. “Mail.” Chicago Sun-Times, 29 March 1978. Haughney, Joseph F. “Anatomy of a Packet-Switching Overhaul.” Data Communications, June 1982. Holusha, John. “Computer Tied Carter, Mondale Campaigns: The Bethesda Connection.” Washington Star, 21 November 1976. Jacobs, Irwin M., Richard Binder

…

(Data Networks: Analysis and Design), November 1973. ———. “Experimental Communication Protocol: Basic Message Frame.” Notes of the International Network Working Group 48, January 1974. ———.“Interconnection of Packet Switching Networks.” Notes of the International Network Working Group 42, October 1973. ———. “Network Architecture and Components.” Notes of the International Network Working Group 49, August 1973

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the world mass market for memory buffer congestion problems in message blocks data transmission in need for host computer eliminated in nuclear attack survivability and packet-switching transmission in periodic failures of radio linkage of redundancy levels in remote maintenance and troubleshooting of response time and reliability in routing procedures in satellite

…

Advanced Research Projects Agency) network responsibilities divested by databases Data computer datagrams data-reconfiguration service Davies, Donald Watts background and education of pioneering work on packet-switching by small network experiment of translator computer envisioned by DCA (Defense Communications Agency) DDP-516 computer BBN modifications of core memory of debugging of heavy

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