Louis Pouzin | |
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Born | 20 April 1931 (age 85) Chantenay-Saint-Imbert |
Citizenship | France |
Alma mater | Polytechnique school |
Awards | Knight of the Legion of Honour, Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, IEEE Internet Award, Internet Hall of Fame, SIGCOMM Award |
Louis Pouzin (born 1931 in Chantenay-Saint-Imbert, Nièvre, France) invented the datagram and designed an early packet communications network, CYCLADES.
He studied at the École Polytechnique from 1950 to 1952.
His work influenced Robert Kahn, Vinton Cerf, and others in the development of TCP/IP protocols used by the Internet.
Having participated in the design of the Compatible Time Sharing System (CTSS), Pouzin wrote a program called RUNCOM around 1963/64. RUNCOM permitted the execution of contained commands within a folder, and can be considered the ancestor of the command-line interface and shell scripts. Pouzin was, in fact, the one who coined the term shell for a command language in 1964 or '65. Pouzin's concepts were later implemented in Multics by Glenda Schroeder at MIT.
From 1967 to 1969 Pouzin developed one operating system for Météo-France, the French national meteorological service, using ControlData6400 as hardware. This system was created for weather forecast and statiscs and was used for 15 years.
In 2002 Pouzin -along with Jean-Louis Grangé, Jean-Pierre Henninot and Jean-François Morfin- participated in the creation of Eurolinc, which is a non-profit association that promotes multilingualism in domain names. In june 2003, Eurolinc was accredited by UNO to participate at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS).