Donald Watts Davies died 31st March 2000 aged 75.
Donald Davies was one of the pioneers of data transmission which contributed to the development of the Internet. He coined the term 'packet switching' for data transmission in 1966. Packet switching was fundamental to the functioning of the Internet.
Davies and his team from the National Physical Laboratory in the UK presented a paper on Packet Switching at a conference in Tennessee in 1967. At the same conference Lawrence Roberts of ARPA presented a design for creating a computer network. This led to the development of ARPANET.
Davies' later work concentrated on the security of data. He undertook security studies for teleprocessing systems, financial institutions, government agencies and suppliers.
He worked almost all his working life with the NPL. In 1974 he received the British Computer Society Award.
His books included "Communication Networks for Computers" in 1973. "Computer Networks and their Protocols" in 1979, and "Security for Computer Networks" in 1984.
(Summary of article published on the Internet Society Web site. For full article click 'here'.)
Paul Baran
Co-inventor of packet-switching; wrote papers on the fundamentals of packet-switching and design of a distributed data network in the early 1960s while working for RAND Corporation.
Vint Cerf
Co-inventor of the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)and became the leading advocate for its worldwide adoption in the 1980s. He had been a graduate student in computer science at UCLA in 1969 and became involved in the installation of the first IMP and early operation of the Network Measurement Center. Was a member of the original Network Working Group (NWG).
Larry Roberts
Director and principal architect of the ARPA network experiment, and often referred to as "the father of the ARPANET". He designed and wrote the network specification, drafted the Request For Proposals, and oversaw all work on the project from 1966 to 1973,and became director of ARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office in 1969. He conducted groundbreaking proof-of-principle TX-2 networking experiment with Wes Clark at Lincoln Lab in early 1966 before moving to ARPA. He left ARPA in 1973 to direct TELENET.
Bob Kahn
(Pictured with Severo Ornstein). Co-inventor (with Vint Cerf) of TCP/IP. A mathematician who had been a professor of electrical engineering (on leave at BBN) in 1967, working on communications and information theory. He joined BBN project team to design and build the first IMP and organized the first public demonstration of the ARPA Network in 1972. A leader in the development of packet-radio and packet-satellite networks.
All photographs
courtesy of Simonsays.com
