Donald Watts Davies
Packet-switching technology
- His dad worked in a coal mine and passed away the year Donald W. Davies and his twin sister were born.
- He was extraordinarily talented, he had several offers for scholarships and, in his honour, his school was closed for half a day (“ For a short time, I was the most popular boy at school.”)
- In his early days at NPL he was one of the leading developers of ACE – one of the fastest computers of its time
- In 1965 he worked independently from Paul Baran on packet-switching technology and published his findings in 1966
- Although some thousand miles were laying between him and Baran, both their concepts were surprisingly similar – they even chose the same packet size and bit rate
- While Baran had a military motivation for his development, Davies wanted to create a new public communication network, suitable for the requirements of communicating computers
- He chose the term “packet” very well thought and he even consulted two linguists
- The term „packet switching“ is by all means much more concise than Baran’s „Distributed Adaptive Message Block Switching“
- He met Baran years later and confessed that he was very embarrassed to hear from Baran’s work only after he had finished his own work, but then he added: “You might have had the idea first, but the name stems from me.”
Donald Watts Davies
born in 1924 in Wales
Studied at the Imperial College in London
University of Birmingham, NPL (National Physical Laboratory)
