Historical contribution
What Baran contributed
Paul Baran's RAND work in the early 1960s developed distributed digital communications using standard message blocks, adaptive store-and-forward routing and redundancy, with survivability under attack as a major goal. Donald Davies and his NPL team independently developed packet communication in the mid-1960s, coined the packet terminology and pursued efficient data communication for interactive computers. ARPANET, first connected in 1969, implemented packet.
Why it mattered
Shares network links efficiently among bursty digital traffic through packetisation, buffering and forwarding without requiring a dedicated end-to-end circuit.
Connected topics
Where this fits in ITEM
Evidence
Sources and further reading
- Donald Davies
National Physical Laboratory
- Internet History of the 1960s
Computer History Museum · 1960
- On Distributed Communications I: Introduction to Distributed Communications Networks
Paul Baran · 1964
- On Distributed Communications VIII: The Multiplexing Station
Paul Baran · 1964
- Packet Switching: The First Steps on the Road to the Information Society
NPL
- The Interface Message Processor for the ARPA Computer Network
W. R. Crowther · 1970