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

Wed Dec 4 12:51:07 EST 2013

+1
and -once again- bravo Louis !

Please, Mawaki, you should be (more) indulgent with the French government : a lot/most of countries -the UK and Germany for instance, but also AT&T- failed to take the Internet lane ! Instead of that they were building their optical fibre networks ... that Internet was happy to take ! And what's more, they had to invest money in masses for building their networks but they were able to pay for it. This self-financing model is seriously burdened by the "business" that the Internet has become. Just take a look on the telcos' ARPU ...

As Louis, I believe thet Internet has to evolve and improve for living. Thus there is some place for other "Louis" -and hopefully in Africa!- in this perspective.

Best regards

Jean-Louis Fullsack 

> Message du 04/12/13 17:34
> De : "Mawaki Chango" 
> A : "Internet Governance" , "michael gurstein" 
> Copie à : 
> Objet : Re: [governance] FW: [IP] Economist article on Louis Pouzin
> 
> 
+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  wrote:
> 
From: Andrew Russell 
Subject: Economist article on Pouzin
Date: December 4, 2013 at 10:07:39 AM EST
To: Dave Farber 

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 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
> 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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