Donald Davies
| Donald Watts Davies | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
7 June 1924 Treorchy, Glamorgan, Wales |
| Died | 28 May 2000 (aged 75) |
| Nationality | Welsh |
| Fields | Computer science |
| Institutions | National Physical Laboratory |
| Alma mater | Imperial College |
| Known for | Packet switching |
Donald Watts Davies, CBE, FRS (7 June 1924 – 28 May 2000) was a Welsh computer scientist who was employed at the UK National Physical Laboratory (NPL). In 1965 he developed the concept of packet switching in computer networking, and implemented it in the NPL network. This was independent of the work of Paul Baran in the United States who had a similar idea in the early 1960s. The ARPANET project credited Davies primarily for his influence.
Davies was born in Treorchy in the Rhondda Valley, Wales. His father, a clerk at a coalmine, died a few months later, and his mother took Donald and his twin sister back to her home town of Portsmouth, where he went to school.
He received a BSc degree in physics (1943) at Imperial College London, and then joined the war effort working as an assistant to Klaus Fuchs on the nuclear weapons Tube Alloys project at Birmingham University. He then returned to Imperial taking a first class degree in mathematics (1947); he was also awarded the Lubbock memorial Prize as the outstanding mathematician of his year.
In 1955, he married Diane Burton; they had a daughter and two sons.
From 1947, he worked at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) where Alan Turing was designing the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) computer. It is said that Davies spotted mistakes in Turing's seminal 1936 paper On Computable Numbers, much to Turing's annoyance. These were perhaps some of the first "programming" errors in existence, even if they were for a theoretical computer, the universal Turing machine. The ACE project was overambitious and floundered, leading to Turing's departure. Davies took the project over and concentrated on delivering the less ambitious Pilot ACE computer, which first worked in May 1950. A commercial spin-off, DEUCE was manufactured by English Electric Computers and became one of the best-selling machines of the 1950s.
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