We often said that change is the only constant in the 21st Century. And there is little doubt that the restless tone of these times is something that the web has helped to accelerate. But the only reason that the internet and the web can cope with that punishing pace is thanks to work done four decades ago by British mathematician Donald Davies at the UK’s National Physical Laboratory (NPL).
On 5 August 1968 Dr Davies gave the first public presentation of work he had been doing on a method of moving data around computer networks called “packet switching”. The idea may sound mundane but, said John Pethica chief science advisor at the NPL, the modern world would be a lot slower without it.
The internet, mobile phone networks and fixed line phones now all use the principles Davies and his team established to cram as much data as they can down the cables and wires making up the world’s telecommunication networks.
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