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

[Mawaki Chango]

+1
Ah, the French government! They always have a way with missing historical
moments such as this -- taking the wrong decision at the... wrong time
(well, time is always wrong for wrong decisions, anyway.)

mawaki


On Wed, Dec 4, 2013 at 3:28 PM, michael gurstein <gurstein at gmail.com> wrote:

> *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-helped-create-internet-now-he-campaigning-ensure-its
>
>
> The internet’s fifth manLouis 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-helped-create-internet-now-he-campaigning-ensure-its
>
>
>
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