IP-FLASH A Paternity Dispute Divides Net Pioneers

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
>
> November 8, 2001
> A Paternity Dispute Divides Net Pioneers
> By KATIE HAFNER
> <http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/08/technology/circuits/08NETT.html?todaysheadlines>
>
> [F] EW inventions are immune from claims and counterclaims of precedence. 
> Thomas Edison was embroiled in a number of patent disputes. It took years 
> for the Wright brothers to secure their rightful claim to aircraft-powered 
> flight.
>
> Now a dispute is churning around credit for a modern scientific 
> breakthrough: packet switching, the technology that breaks all data that 
> travels over the Internet into discrete bundles that are then sent along 
> various paths around the network and reassembled at their destination.
>
> Aside from computer scientists, few people had heard of packet switching, 
> much less its 1960's origins, until the 1990's. Then the Internet moved 
> from academia into the home and the office, and histories of its 
> development began to appear.
>
> It was about that time that Leonard Kleinrock, a computer scientist at the 
> University of California at Los Angeles, began to stake his claim to 
> having been the father of packet switching. In 1996 he set up a Web page 
> on the university's site that describes him as the "Inventor of the 
> Internet Technology" and credits him with "having created the basic 
> principles of packet switching."
>
> Until Dr. Kleinrock began making his case prominently, two others - Donald 
> Davies, a British expert on computer security, and Paul Baran, formerly of 
> the RAND Corporation - were widely recognized as packet switching's 
> inventors. In the early 1960's, Mr. Baran outlined a packet- switched 
> network that would make communications less vulnerable to attack or 
> disruption. Dr. Davies, who first applied the word "packet" to data 
> communication in the mid-1960's, later built a small packet- switched network.
>
> Still, some found Dr. Kleinrock's claim persuasive, if belated. This year, 
> for example, he was among four laureates who shared a $500,000 prize for 
> their roles in creating the Internet. The prize, administered by the 
> National Academy of Engineering, cited Dr. Kleinrock for publishing on 
> packet switching as early as 1961.
>
> But Dr. Davies has struck back, in a paper published a year after his 
> death at age 75. "In Leonard Kleinrock's work," he wrote, "I can find no 
> evidence that he understood the principles of packet switching."
>
> The assertion has riven the ranks of Internet pioneers. It has also left 
> the two sides in the awkward position of arguing over an eminent 
> colleague's final testament.
>
> "The Internet is really the work of a thousand people," Mr. Baran said. 
> "And of all the stories about what different people have done, all the 
> pieces fit together. It's just this one little case that seems to be an 
> aberration."
>
> The dispute is all the more remarkable, those who knew Dr. Davies say, 
> because he was known for being humble - to a fault, some say - about his 
> own accomplishments. In addition to his work on computer networks, he was 
> a computer security expert, working with a small development team headed 
> by Alan Turing, the British mathematician and cryptography expert who 
> broke German codes during World War II.
>
> "Donald Davies is one of those men who brings to mind Harry Truman's 
> observation that `you can accomplish anything you want in life provided 
> you don't mind who gets the credit,' " wrote John Naughton, author of "A 
> Brief History of the Future: From Radio Days to Internet Years in a 
> Lifetime" (Overlook Press, 2000). Mr. Naughton's history and others like 
> it (including one published in 1996 by this reporter) credited Dr. Davies 
> and Mr. Baran with having invented packet switching.
>
> Dr. Davies's last word on the subject came in a paper published 
> posthumously last summer in The Computer Journal, a publication of the 
> British Computer Society. However self-effacing by nature, Dr. Davies was 
> blunt in rejecting Dr. Kleinrock's claim, though the issue may require 
> splitting the finest of technical hairs.
>
> For years Dr. Kleinrock was known for his work in queuing theory, a branch 
> of mathematics that studies how long people and things spend waiting in 
> lines, how long the lines get and how to design systems to reduce waiting. 
> Dr. Kleinrock said in an interview that although the two fields are 
> different, "it turns out that queuing theory is the perfect tool for 
> analyzing the way packet networks behave."
>
> In his paper, Dr. Davies found fault with Dr. Kleinrock for not describing 
> message switching beyond a single node, or queue, in his 1962 doctoral 
> thesis. "Following through such a scheme would have made an interesting 
> study," Dr. Davies wrote. "But Kleinrock does not go beyond the single queue."
>
> Dr. Kleinrock disputes that assertion. "My entire dissertation is devoted 
> to data networks which consist of connected sets of single nodes," he said.
>
> And more generally, Dr. Kleinrock called the Davies article "shocking." He 
> and Dr. Davies had exchanged cordial e-mail in the months leading to Dr. 
> Davies's death, Dr. Kleinrock said, and he had no idea that Dr. Davies was 
> writing the paper.
>
> Dr. Davies was adamant that the paper not be published until after his 
> death, said Michael Davies, his son. "He felt that if it came out during 
> the latter stages of his illness, he wouldn't have the strength to get in 
> a debate about it," Mr. Davies said. "But he felt deeply that he had to 
> set the record straight."
>
> Yet perhaps counter to Dr. Davies's intentions, instead of helping resolve 
> the matter, his paper has simply helped galvanize each side.
>
> Lawrence G. Roberts, who in the late 1960's designed the Arpanet, the 
> precursor to the Internet, has been a prominent backer of Dr. Kleinrock's 
> claim, at least in recent years. His honors include two that were shared 
> with Dr. Kleinrock - the National Academy of Engineering award and last 
> year's I.E.E.E. Internet Award from the Institute of Electrical and 
> Electronics Engineers. (The latter award, unlike the academy's prize, also 
> recognized Dr. Davies and Mr. Baran.)
>
> While they were graduate students and researchers at the Massachusetts 
> Institute of Technology in the 1960's, Dr. Kleinrock became a close 
> colleague and friend of Dr. Roberts. Inveterate casino gamblers, the two 
> scientists together tried to beat the odds at blackjack and roulette with 
> various clever methods. They remain good friends.
>
> Throughout the early 1990's, when asked, Dr. Roberts pointed to his own 
> work, as well as the work of Mr. Baran and Dr. Davies, as the major 
> influences on his thinking when he designed the network. It wasn't until 
> Dr. Kleinrock began to lobby for recognition that Dr. Roberts changed his 
> mind and not only began citing Dr. Kleinrock's work but also took up his 
> friend's cause.
>
> <snip>