Celebrating The Origins of Packet Switching 59
XaN-ASMoDi writes with an interesting historical piece at the BBC on the early history of packet switching, excerpting: "It has often been said that change is the only constant in the 21st Century. And there is little doubt that the restless tone of these times is something that the web has helped to accelerate, but the only reason that [...] the web can cope with that punishing pace is thanks to work done four decades ago by British mathematician Donald Davies at the UK's National Physical Laboratory (NPL).
On 5 August 1968 Dr Davies gave the first public presentation of work he had been doing on a method of moving data around computer networks called 'packet switching.'"
All times (Score:4, Insightful)
It has often been said that change is the only constant in the 21st Century.
I've never heard that applied specifically to the 21st century. It's an oddly-specific use of the phrase: does that imply that change has not been constant in other times? Empires grow and fall, cultures collapse or are swept away or conquered by the next Big Empire, customs change, ethnic identities change, etc etc. The only unique thing about the 21st century is that we've inherited a tradition of rapid technological change. Technology is important but it's hardly the only thing that changes over time and it strikes me as fairly myopic to single out the 21st century as a time of change.
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does that imply that change has not been constant in other times?
Actually, it's an inherent property of the universe. You know, quantum physics and stuff.
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Einsteinian relativity gets the blame for time.
Quantum physics has enough to worry about as it is.
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With apologies to Douglas Adams...
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.
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Changing change (Score:5, Interesting)
It's an oddly-specific use of the phrase: does that imply that change has not been constant in other times?
Re-read it. It says that the only thing that doesn't change in the 21st century is that things change. Arguably, things always change, in which case the phrase is vapid. At the same time, the rate at which things change is accelerating. Compare life in Europe, circa 1000 with 1100. Then compare life in Europe 1900 and 2000 - the differences are much greater!
change is now slower (Score:2, Insightful)
Compare life in Europe, circa 1000 with 1100. Then compare life in Europe 1900 and 2000 - the differences are much greater!
But has it really changed that much in the last 30-40 years?
The majority of the largest changes in the last hundred years would be: electrification ('10s), radio ('20s), telephone ('30s).
Secondary changes would be automobile growth ('40s), the mainstreaming of the automobile ('50s) and television ('50s). The most recent change since the 1950s would the mainstreaming of computers in the late '90s.
I think the delta from before World War I and to just after World War II would be the greatest amount of change
You and the CEO of Sony Pictures? (Score:1)
> But has it really changed that much in the last 30-40 years?
Geez, you're so enmeshed in the Internet you don't even think about its existence!
Or maybe you just live in the present. If you had a really good memory, you'd understand that just 10 years ago encyclopedias were (only) books and Wikipedia didn't exist. Actually, about 20 years ago the Internet as we know it currently didn't exist (yeah, geeks used it for email, listserves, FTP, maybe gopher).
In the last 20 years, easy lossless copyability of
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As far as impact on society, I'd tend to agree. The automobile, telephone, radio, and indoor plumbing made the biggest change of life-style. Interesting technologies have come since, but none of them have changed the way average people lived in such a dramatic way.
(And, there's still no @#^%$ flying cars.)
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It's clearly not the case that the first derivative of the status quo is not a constant. Likewise I can think of things that are a constant that are not change (e.g. the number grams in a kilogram). Altogether I think that whoever it is who comes up with these expressions is not mathematically or scientifically literate.
I mean, take a saying like "the more things change, the more things stay the same." What are we supposed to make of that?
Re:All times (Score:5, Insightful)
Altogether I think that whoever it is who comes up with these expressions is not mathematically or scientifically literate.
Altogether I think that people who read phrases like "the only constant is change" and flourish a physical constant as counterevidence have completely missed the point of the expression.
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I mean, take a saying like "the more things change, the more things stay the same." What are we supposed to make of that?
Well I always thought it meant that although many things will seem to change a great deal on the surface, when you look at a deeper, more fundamental level, the same old principles are still at work. Take the machinations of Politics as an example!
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I have to say, though - when I come to slashdot, I'm not really looking f
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does that imply that change has not been constant in other times?
No because he said it's the only constant of this century, that implies nothing about any other time, only that in the 21st Century, any other constants that might have existed in the past, no longer apply.
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You got nothing to fear except fear itself.
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There are probably a million and one ways that this has been expressed. The way that sticks in my mind puts the blame on Solomon : he's bored being the brainy guy in the throne room, so decides to give some of the Grand Vizers, Lord High Muckamucks and High Heidjuns some brain exercise. He asks them to go away and come up with a factual statement which will always be tr
Celebrate? (Score:1, Funny)
The Dawn of The Net (Score:2, Funny)
made me realize the intarnet is not tubes at all
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Not tubes. Pipes! Why? Pipes are bigger than tubes.
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Well, CSS does act that way ;-)
Multiple sources (Score:5, Informative)
Paul A. Baran and Leonard Kleinrock also get credit for packet switching. It appears that multiple inventors independently (or semi-independently) came up with the idea and helped make it usable.
Re:Multiple sources (Score:5, Informative)
There was also the alohanet in Hawaii, which introduced the concept of a shared channel and CSMA/CD:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALOHAnet [wikipedia.org]
The article deals with one aspect of packet switching, and it seems more like they were thinking about SONET-like systems.
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Ops! Take the /CD off the end.
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Actually, take out the CS at the start... :)
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Baran was first:
http://www.livinginternet.com/i/iw_packet_inv.htm
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It reminds me how almost every country claims to have invented the airplane. The thing is that there were indeed many tinkerers with interesting contraptions, including in South America, not just Europe. The US lays claim to the invention by using the term "controlled flight". In other words, the Wrights' plane crashed less, and thus allegedly gets credit. But, the first to actually
Sounds Like Another How I Won the War Story (Score:4, Interesting)
A lot of people made contributions around that time. As a then undergraduate flunky in a physics lab, I remember playing with an early network that linked the Illiac II with a bunch of other computers. Since we weren't supposed to be playing with it, all we could do was come up with the login prompts, but several Midwestern universities were linked already. ARPANET sputtered to life in 1969, too soon for the touted theoretical contributions to be seminal. I don't doubt Davies did important work, but the article is over hyped.
Leonard Kleinrock did it before that (1961) (Score:3, Informative)
Packet switching at NPL (Score:2, Interesting)
My Dad worked with Donald Davies. That's him on the far right in the pic on the BBC. He would have been 85 tomorrow.
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Why is this article about packet switching? It should be titled "Rare photo of Anonymous Coward's father found". And tell us how crack physiognomists are using the image to create a likeness of the elusive AC.
Packet switching was originally developed... (Score:5, Informative)
by Paul Baran in the early 1960's.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packet_switching [wikipedia.org]
Baran developed the concept of packet switching during his research at the RAND Corporation for the US Air Force into survivable communications networks, first presented to the Air Force in the summer of 1961 as briefing B-265 [1] then published as RAND Paper P-2626 in 1962 [1], and then including and expanding somewhat within a series of eleven papers titled On Distributed Communications in 1964 [2]. Baran's P-2626 paper described a general architecture for a large-scale, distributed, survivable communications network. The paper focuses on three key ideas: first, use of a decentralized network with multiple paths between any two points; and second, dividing complete user messages into what he called message blocks (later called packets); then third, delivery of these messages by store and forward switching.
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And what about Louis Pouzin ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Pouzin
Really I think it was an idea floating during the 60s that a lot of people have been exposed to.
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The same is true for a lot of inventions. Seems to be that inventions just seem to have their time. The light bulb, the aeroplane, television, the telephone - there were a lot of people working on them at the same time, and if the recognised inventor had not managed it, someone else would have.
A
Where Wizards Stay Up Late (Score:3, Interesting)
Interesting that this event just came up. I just finished reading Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet [librarything.com] today. For those interested in the history of ARPA and internetworking development (and the people behind these developments - Davies, Kleinrock, Licklider, et. al.), I highly recommend this book.
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Seconded.
That's a great book, written by a fellow who worked with ARPANET development from the beginning. He starts out the book talking about attending a conference where his goal was to debunk the myth that the ARPANET was created for communication in the wake of a nuclear attack - he says that yes, packet switching was originally proposed for that purpose, but the ARPANET was a separate project and wasn't designed for that sort of fault tolerance.
If you're ever curious about how things worked at BBN, wh
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Agreed -- it's a great book. My father worked with the ARPANET team, so I got to meet most of the BBN folks mentioned in the book over the years (most at dinner parties at one or another of their houses). Once I'd read the book, I went back and asked a bunch of them how accurate it was: they all had some nitpicking to do ("Well, it was a long time ago, but this piece isn't quite how I remember it...."), but agreed that it was the most accurate account they'd seen.
Kate and Matt did a great job; it should
Telegraph and Mail (Score:5, Interesting)
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Exactly right. In fact, the relationship is even closer than the parent states. Telegrams have a true packet structure, with a header and payload. Further, the headers have distinct fields, including a unique message ID, message types, source and destination addresses, detailed QoS (Quality of Service) provisions, timestamps, and message length, just to name a few.
The Western Union network used location-based routing, with smaller, local-area lines connected to hubs having dedicated point-to-point links t
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Autodin (Score:2, Interesting)
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Not to nit-pick, but AUTODIN was message-switched [wikipedia.org]. (I worked AUTODIN software in the early '80s.)
The distinction between message-switching and packet-switching is small but crucial. The quantum of messaging in a message-switched network is an entire message. That's why AUTODIN implemented overrides and interrupts, permitting a high-precedence message to override a long lower-precedence message. When that happened, the receiving switch discarded the partly-received lower-precedence message, received and proc