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In the 1960s, two researchers, Paul Baran and Donald Davies, independently came up with the idea of packet-switching, a revolutionary way of transmitting information in a new kind of communications network. Paul Baran, an immigrant from Eastern Europe, had a background in electrical engineering and was working at the RAND Corporation. He became interested in the survivability of communications systems under nuclear attack during the height of the Cold War. He saw that the existing communications networks were vulnerable and began to develop the idea of a distributed network with redundant connections between nodes. He also proposed the concept of dividing messages into smaller blocks or packets that could be sent independently over the network and reassembled at their destination.

Baran faced resistance from the traditional communications community, including AT&T, who dismissed his ideas as unworkable. However, with the support of his colleagues at RAND, Baran continued to develop his concept and wrote numerous technical papers explaining his ideas. He also conducted simulations to demonstrate the survivability of a distributed network with redundancy. Baran’s work caught the attention of the Pentagon, who recognized the need for a more stable communications infrastructure in the event of a nuclear attack. In 1965, RAND sent a formal recommendation to the Air Force to build a distributed switching network.

Meanwhile, in London, Donald Davies, a physicist at the British National Physical Laboratory, was independently working on a similar idea for a packet-switching network. Davies was motivated by the desire to create a new public communications network that could handle the irregular, bursty characteristics of computer-generated data traffic. He also envisioned the need for an intermediary device, a new computer, that could translate between different computer systems. Davies coined the term “packet” to describe the small pieces of data that would be sent over the network.

While Baran’s and Davies’ ideas were strikingly similar, they had different motivations and approaches. Baran focused on the survivability of a network under nuclear attack, while Davies focused on the efficiency and interconnection of computer systems. Both faced resistance from established telecommunications companies, but Davies received more support from the British telecommunications establishment. In 1966, he was appointed head of the computer science division at the NPL and began seeking funding for an experimental network.

Despite their independent discoveries, Baran and Davies did not know about each other’s work until they met several years later. Davies admitted to feeling embarrassed when he learned about Baran’s work, but recognized that Baran had come up with the concept first. However, Davies had coined the term “packet,” which became the standard terminology for describing the small blocks of data transmitted over a network.

In summary, Paul Baran and Donald Davies independently developed the idea of packet-switching in the 1960s. Baran focused on the survivability of a network under nuclear attack, while Davies focused on the efficiency and interconnection of computer systems. Both faced resistance from established telecommunications companies, but their ideas eventually gained recognition and laid the foundation for the development of modern computer networks.

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