Donald Davies
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- In full:
- Donald Watts Davies
- Died:
- May 28, 2000, Esher, Surrey, England (aged 75)
Donald Davies (born June 7, 1924, Treorchy, Glamorgan, Wales—died May 28, 2000, Esher, Surrey, England) British computer scientist and inventor of packet switching, along with American electrical engineer Paul Baran.
Davies studied at Imperial College in London, obtaining degrees in physics (B.Sc., 1943) and mathematics (B.Sc., 1947). In 1947 he went to work on the design of the Automatic Computing Engine under Alan Turing at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in suburban Teddington, and he remained associated with the NPL for all of his professional life. In 1965–66 Davies helped to lay the groundwork for the Internet when he devised a more efficient method of computer communications known as packet switching, a technique in which each data stream is broken into discrete, easily conveyed blocks—or packets, as Davies called them—of data that can be electronically transmitted between remote computers and then reassembled into the original message. Digital packet switching allowed networks greater flexibility and throughput and was used in the United States in the late 1960s as the basis of ARPANET, a computer network that was later expanded into the Internet.
Davies was made a fellow of the British Computer Society in 1975 and of the Royal Society in 1987. In 1984 he retired from the scientific civil service, and through 1999 he was a consultant in security engineering for the financial and media industries. During this time Davies received several honours, including being made Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1983.