Donald Davies' work was independent of the work of Paul Baran in the United States who had a similar idea in the early 1960s, and who provided input to the ARPANET project, after his work was highlighted by Donald Davies' team.
22 Facts About Donald Davies
2.
Donald Davies was born in Treorchy in the Rhondda Valley, Wales.
3.
Donald Davies received a BSc degree in physics at Imperial College London, and then joined the war effort working as an assistant to Klaus Fuchs on the nuclear weapons Tube Alloys project at Birmingham University.
4.
Donald Davies then returned to Imperial taking a first class degree in mathematics ; he was awarded the Lubbock memorial Prize as the outstanding mathematician of his year.
5.
Donald Davies took over the project and concentrated on delivering the less ambitious Pilot ACE computer, which first worked in May 1950.
6.
Donald Davies worked on applications of traffic simulation and machine translation.
7.
In 1965, Donald Davies developed the idea of packet switching, dividing computer messages into packets that are routed independently across a network, possibly via differing routes, and are reassembled at the destination.
8.
Donald Davies used the word "packets" after consulting with a linguist because it was capable of being translated into languages other than English without compromise.
9.
Donald Davies designed and proposed a commercial national data network based on packet switching in his 1966 Proposal for the Development of a National Communications Service for On-line Data Processing.
10.
Donald Davies became interested in data communications following a visit to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he saw that a significant problem with the new time-sharing computer systems was the cost of keeping a phone connection open for each user.
11.
Donald Davies was the first to describe the concept of an "Interface computer", in 1966, today known as a router.
12.
Donald Davies first presented his own ideas on packet switching at a conference in Edinburgh on 5 August 1968.
13.
At NPL Donald Davies directed the development of a local-area packet-switched network, the Mark I NPL network.
14.
Baran was happy to acknowledge that Donald Davies had come up with the same idea as him independently.
15.
Internetworking experiments at NPL under Donald Davies included connecting with the European Informatics Network by translating between two different host protocols and connecting with the Post Office Experimental Packet Switched Service using a common host protocol in both networks.
16.
Donald Davies relinquished his management responsibilities in 1979 to return to research.
17.
Donald Davies retired from NPL in 1984, becoming a leading consultant on data security to the banking industry and publishing a book on the topic that year.
18.
In 1987, Donald Davies became a visiting professor at Royal Holloway and Bedford New College.
19.
Donald Davies was appointed a Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society in 1975 and was made a CBE in 1983, and later a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1987.
20.
Donald Davies received the John Player Award from the BCS in 1974.
21.
In 2007, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, and in 2012 Donald Davies was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame by the Internet Society.
22.
Donald Davies was survived by his wife Diane, a daughter and two sons.