Donald W. Davies; Work Led to the Internet

Donald W. Davies, 75, whose pioneering work on data transmission contributed to the development of the Internet. Working at England’s National Physical Laboratory, Davies is credited with coining the term “packet switching” in 1966 for data transmission that is fundamental to the workings of the Internet. He led a team that built one of the first functioning networks using packet data. In a recent article for England’s Guardian newspaper, Davies explained packet switching as “the stream of bits broken up into short messages, or ‘packets,’ that find their way individually to the destination, where they are reassembled into the original stream.” He said the system overcame the inefficiency of a computer’s sending an entire file to another computer in an uninterrupted stream of data, which he said produced “bursty” computer traffic with long periods of silence. Davies’ team presented its paper at a 1967 conference in Tennessee where Lawrence Roberts of the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the U.S. Department of Defense presented a design for creating a computer network. In the U.S., this led to the development of ARPANET, the prototype for the Internet. Davies, who received the British Computer Society Award in 1974, wrote several books, including “Communication Networks for Computers” in 1973, “Computer Networks and their Protocols” in 1979, and “Security for Computer Networks” in 1984. On Sunday in London.