Donald Davies (1924-2000)

See Also

Community, Internet, Networks

On Sunday, May 28, 2000 Donald Davies, who had lead a team designing packet switching, died.

Davies, who had worked with Alan Turing on the development of one of the first modern computers, decided to explore the concept of computer networking in 1965. To achieve communication between computers, Davies realized that he needed a fast message switching communication service, in which long messages were split into chunks sent separately so as to minimize the risk of congestion. The chunks he called packets, and the technique became known as packet-switching and served as the groundwork on which others have built to create the Internet (TCP and IP, the basic building blocks of the Internet are based on this packet-switching concept.)

Around the same time, similar work was done by Paul Baran and Leonard Kleinrock who happened on the same conclusions.

He continued to contribute to the Internet as time went on, and was the co-author of the first paper on Message Authenticator Algorithm, which was the first cryptographic hash function or message digest to gain widespread acceptance.

News Coverage

From the mainstream press to the trades, a lot of people have been covering Don’s death. Here are the links I found:

• Associated Press
• London Times
• UK Unix Group
• The Guardian
• Slashdot

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