Donald Davies

Donald Watts Davies ( born June 7, 1924 in Treorchy, † 28 May 2000 Esher, England) was a physicist and one of the pioneers of information technology.

Life

Davies grew up in Portsmouth and studied at Imperial College, London. From 1943 on, he worked at the University of Birmingham in nuclear research. In 1947, he was with the group of Alan Turing ( decipherers Enigma (machine) and developer of the Turing machine ) in contact, who worked on the development of the Pilot ACE computer - one of the first digital data-processing equipment in the world.

From 1963 to Davies developed the method of packet switching, with which has since the entire Internet data exchange will be handled.

The decentralized network structure - in contrast to the beginning of the 1960s favored ring or star structures - has propagated Davies (but see also Paul Baran and history of the Internet ).

1979 gave Davies on his role at the National Physical Laboratory and turned to the increasingly urgent security issues to the Internet. In 1984 he retired, but had continued to work as a consultant.