Donald Davies

Donald Watts Davies, (7 June 1924 – 28 May 2000) was a British computer scientist and Internet pioneer who was employed at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in the United Kingdom. During 1965-1967, he and his team at the NPL invented modern data communications, including packet switching, high-speed routers, layered communication protocols, hierarchical computer networks and the essence of the end-to-end principle, concepts that are used today in computer networks worldwide. He envisioned, in 1966, that there would be a single network for data and telephone communications. Davies proposed and studied a commercial national data network in the United Kingdom and designed and built the first implementation of packet switching in the local-area NPL network in 1969 to demonstrate the technology. Many of the wide-area packet-switched networks built in the late 1960s and 1970s were similar in nearly all respects to his original 1965 design. 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. 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 also provided input to the ARPANET project, after his work was highlighted by Davies' team.

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