32 Facts About Donald Davies

Donald Davies envisioned, in 1966, that there would be a "single network" for data and telephone communications.

Donald Davies' work influenced the ARPANET in the United States and the CYCLADES project in France, and was key to the development of the data communications technology used in Internet, which is a network of networks.

Donald Davies' work was independent of the work of Paul Baran in the United States who had some similar ideas in the early 1960s, and who provided input to the ARPANET project, after his work was highlighted by Donald Davies' team.

Donald Davies was born in Treorchy in the Rhondda Valley, Wales.

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.

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.

Donald Davies took over the project and concentrated on delivering the less ambitious Pilot ACE computer, which first worked in May 1950.

Donald Davies worked on applications of traffic simulation and machine translation.

In 1965, Donald Davies became interested in data communications following a seminar he gave at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Donald Davies saw that a significant problem with the new time-sharing computer systems was the cost of keeping a phone connection open for each user.

Donald Davies applied the principle of time-sharing to the data communications line as well as the computer to invent the concept of what he called packet switching.

Donald Davies proposed dividing computer messages into very "short messages in fixed format" that are routed independently across a network, with differing routes allowed for related packets, which are reassembled at the destination.

Donald Davies used the word "packet" after consulting with a linguist because it was capable of being translated into languages other than English without compromise.

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.

Donald Davies applied queueing theory to show that "there is an ample margin between the estimated performance of the [packet-switched] system and the stated requirement" in terms of a satisfactory response time for a human user.

Donald Davies first presented his own ideas on packet switching at a conference in Edinburgh on 5 August 1968.

In 1969, Donald Davies was invited to Japan to lecture on packet switching.

Donald Davies gave a series of nine three-hour lectures, concluding with an intense discussion with around 80 people.

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.

Donald Davies published Computer networks and their protocols in 1979, in which he notes:.

Donald Davies relinquished his management responsibilities in 1979 to return to research.

Donald Davies became particularly interested in computer network security and his research on cryptography led to a number of patents, including methods for providing secure communication to enable the use of smart cards.

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.

In 1987, Donald Davies became a visiting professor at Royal Holloway and Bedford New College.

When Donald Davies became aware of Baran's work in 1966 he acknowledged that they both had equally discovered the concept of packet switching and Donald Davies and his team referenced Baran's earlier published work.

Baran was happy to acknowledge that Donald Davies had come up with the same idea as him independently.

Donald Davies' work on data communications and computer network design has been described as the "cornerstone" technology used in the development of the Internet, which is a global system of connected computer networks.

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.

Donald Davies received the John Player Award from the BCS in 1974.

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.

Donald Davies received a lifetime achievement award in 2001 for his research into secure communications for smart cards.

Donald Davies was survived by his wife Diane, a daughter, two sons and four grandchildren.