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

[parminder]

The greatest thing about Louis is that he created a part of what we know 
as Internet technology with an outsider's mindset, key to making 
disruptive innovations, and he still keeps that 'outsider mindset' young 
and unsullied, at 82. He has refused to rest on his laurels, much less 
allow himself the luxury to be courted by those who are globally making 
big on the technology that he helped invent. He still want things to get 
better, and rues the re-centralisation of power and control on the 
Internet throughcreation of walled spaces, which is the major part of 
today's Internet. As he puts it, "recreating Minitel in a way" (out of 
what was supposed to be an open and end to end Internet). The best 
tribute to Louis will be to take this message from him seriously; and to 
put our wits and energies into re-decentralising power on and through 
the Internet.

Louis, you are an inspiration for all of us!


parminder


On Wednesday 04 December 2013 08:58 PM, michael gurstein wrote:
>
> *From: *Andrew Russell <arussell at stevens.edu 
> <mailto: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 <mailto: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 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-helped-create-internet-now-he-campaigning-ensure-its
>
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