[governance] FW: [IP] Economist article on Louis Pouzin

[michael gurstein]

From: Andrew Russell <arussell at stevens.edu>

Subject: Economist article on Pouzin

Date: December 4, 2013 at 10:07:39 AM EST

To: Dave Farber <dave at farber.net>

 

Hi Dave - 

 

For IP - The Economist has published a nice article on Louis Pouzin:

http://www.economist.com/news/technology-quarterly/21590765-louis-pouzin-hel
ped-create-internet-now-he-campaigning-ensure-its

 


The internet’s fifth man


Louis Pouzin helped create the internet. Now he is campaigning to ensure
that its design continues to evolve and improve in future


Nov 30th 2013 | From the print edition
<http://www.economist.com/printedition/2013-11-30> 

AT A glitzy ceremony at Buckingham Palace this summer, Queen Elizabeth II
honoured five pioneers of computer networking. Four of the men who shared
the new £1m ($1.6m) Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering are famous: Vint
Cerf and Bob Kahn, authors of the protocols that underpin the internet; Tim
Berners-Lee, inventor of the world wide web; and Marc Andreessen, creator of
the first successful web browser. But the fifth man is less well known. He
is Louis Pouzin, a garrulous Frenchman whose contribution to the field is
every bit as seminal.

In the early 1970s Mr Pouzin created an innovative data network that linked
locations in France, Italy and Britain. Its simplicity and efficiency
pointed the way to a network that could connect not just dozens of machines,
but millions of them. It captured the imagination of Dr Cerf and Dr Kahn,
who included aspects of its design in the protocols that now power the
internet. Yet in the late 1970s France’s government withdrew its funding for
Mr Pouzin’s project. He watched as the internet swept across the world,
ultimately vindicating him and his work. “Recognition has come very, very
late for Louis,” says Dr Cerf. “Unfairly so.” 

 

[
]

 

Mr Pouzin visited American universities to learn more about ARPANET, a
network funded by the military that had been switched on two years before,
and which relied on a promising new technique called “packet switching” to
deliver data from one machine to another. Chopping up all communications
into data packets of fixed size, and allowing machines to relay packets to
each other, meant that there was no need for a direct link between every
pair of machines on the network. Instead, they could be wired together with
relatively few connections, reducing the cost and increasing the resilience
of the network. If a network link failed, packets could take a different
path.

But to Mr Pouzin, ARPANET seemed over-designed and inefficient. Every
computer required a complex piece of hardware to link it to the network,
because ARPANET’s design included a connection set-up phase, in which a path
across the network was established for communication between two machines.
Packets were then delivered in order along this path.

Mr Pouzin’s team came up with a leaner, more efficient way to do things.
Instead of deciding in advance which path a series of packets should travel
along, they proposed that each packet should be labelled and delivered as an
individual message, called a datagram. On ARPANET, strings of packets
travelled like carriages of a train, travelling in strict order from one
station to another. On CYCLADES, packets were individual cars, each of which
could travel independently to its destination. The receiving computer, not
the network, would then juggle the packets back into order, and request
retransmission of any packets lost in transit.

 

Such “connectionless” packet-switching reduced the need for sophisticated
and costly equipment within the network to establish predetermined routes
for packets. The system’s simplicity also made it easier to link up
different networks. The first CYCLADES connection, between Paris and
Grenoble, debuted in 1973—closely watched by Dr Cerf and Dr Kahn, two
American scientists who were by this time mulling how best to overhaul
ARPANET. They built on Mr Pouzin’s connectionless, datagram-based approach,
so that concepts from CYCLADES found their way into the TCP/IP suite of
protocols on which the modern internet now runs.

 

[snip]

 

http://www.economist.com/news/technology-quarterly/21590765-louis-pouzin-hel
ped-create-internet-now-he-campaigning-ensure-its

 


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