Donald Davies

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pages: 352 words: 96,532

Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet by Katie Hafner, Matthew Lyon

air freight, Bill Duvall, Charles Babbage, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, conceptual framework, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, fault tolerance, Hush-A-Phone, information retrieval, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Leonard Kleinrock, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Multics, natural language processing, OSI model, packet switching, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, speech recognition, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, The Soul of a New Machine

The description of Licklider’s introduction to computers is based on personal interviews with Wes Clark and Jack Ruina, and on Licklider’s interview with the Charles Babbage Institute, as well as the Barber Associates report. Chapter Two The description of Paul Baran’s work on distributed communications is based on personal interviews with Baran, as well as various interviews conducted by the Babbage Institute. The description of Donald Davies’s early work on packet-switching is based on interviews and correspondence with Donald Davies, and on Martin Campbell-Kelly’s articles and interviews. Arthur Norberg and Judy O’Neill’s awesome report, “A History of the Information Processing Techniques Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency” also guided us through biographical material and through the early years of IPTO.

Evolution in science, as in nature—normally a gradual sequence of changes—occasionally makes a revolutionary leap breaking with the course of development. New ideas emerge simultaneously but independently. And so they did when the time was ripe for inventing a new way of transmitting information. In the early 1960s, before Larry Roberts had even set to work creating a new computer network, two other researchers, Paul Baran and Donald Davies—completely unknown to each other and working continents apart toward different goals—arrived at virtually the same revolutionary idea for a new kind of communications network. The realization of their concepts came to be known as packet-switching. Paul Baran was a good-humored immigrant from Eastern Europe.

As the meeting was breaking up, a man from the audience approached Davies and said that he was from the Ministry of Defence. He told Davies about some remarkably similar work that had been circulated in the American defense community by a man named Paul Baran. Davies had never heard of Baran or his RAND studies. Donald Davies was the son of working-class parents. His father, a clerk at a coal mine in Wales, died the year after Donald and his twin sister were born. Their mother moved her young family to Portsmouth, a British naval port, where she went to work as a counter clerk in the post office. Donald experimented with radio at a young age and took an early interest in physics.


pages: 720 words: 197,129

The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson

1960s counterculture, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, c2.com, call centre, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, commons-based peer production, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Debian, desegregation, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, eternal september, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Gary Kildall, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Leonard Kleinrock, Lewis Mumford, linear model of innovation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, packet switching, PageRank, Paul Terrell, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Teledyne, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Yochai Benkler

That is when a young engineer from England, Roger Scantlebury, got up to present a paper describing the research of his boss, Donald Davies of Britain’s National Physical Laboratory. It provided an answer: a method of breaking messages into small units that Davies had dubbed “packets.” Scantlebury added that the idea had been developed independently by a researcher named Paul Baran at RAND. After the talk, Larry Roberts and others gathered around Scantlebury to learn more, then moved on to the bar to discuss it late into the night. PACKET SWITCHING: PAUL BARAN, DONALD DAVIES, AND LEONARD KLEINROCK There are many ways of sending data through a network.

Paul Baran oral history, “How the Web Was Won,” Vanity Fair, July 2008; interview with Paul Baran, by Stewart Brand, Wired, Mar. 2001; Paul Baran oral history, conducted by David Hochfelder, Oct. 24, 1999, IEEE History Center; Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma (Harper, 1997). 58. Donald Davies, “A Historical Study of the Beginnings of Packet Switching,” Computer Journal, British Computer Society, 2001; Abbate, Inventing the Internet, 558; author’s interview with Larry Roberts; Trevor Harris, “Who Is the Father of the Internet? The Case for Donald Davies,” http://www.academia.edu. 59. Author’s interview with Leonard Kleinrock; Leonard Kleinrock oral history, conducted by John Vardalas, IEEE History Center, Feb. 21, 2004. 60.

Engelbart and Bill English invent the mouse. 1972 1964 Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters take bus trip across America. 1965 Ted Nelson publishes first article about “hypertext.” Moore’s Law predicts microchips will double in power each year or so. 1966 Stewart Brand hosts Trips Festival with Ken Kesey. Bob Taylor convinces ARPA chief Charles Herzfeld to fund ARPANET. Donald Davies coins the term packet switching. 1967 ARPANET design discussions in Ann Arbor and Gatlinburg. 1968 Larry Roberts sends out request for bids to build the ARPANET’s IMPs. Noyce and Moore form Intel, hire Andy Grove. Brand publishes first Whole Earth Catalog. Engelbart stages the Mother of All Demos with Brand’s help. 1969 First nodes of ARPANET installed. 1971 Don Hoefler begins column for Electronic News called “Silicon Valley USA.”


pages: 675 words: 141,667

Open Standards and the Digital Age: History, Ideology, and Networks (Cambridge Studies in the Emergence of Global Enterprise) by Andrew L. Russell

Aaron Swartz, American ideology, animal electricity, barriers to entry, borderless world, Californian Ideology, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, creative destruction, digital divide, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Leonard Kleinrock, Lewis Mumford, means of production, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, open economy, OSI model, packet switching, pre–internet, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, vertical integration, web of trust, work culture

Zwimpfer, “Standards Setting for Computer Communication: The Case of X.25,” IEEE Communications Magazine 23 (1985): 38. 31 Cerf, INWG 1. 32 Alex Curran and Vinton Cerf, “The Work of IFIP Group 6.1,” ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review 6 (1975): 18–27; Vinton Cerf, “Affiliation of INWG with IFIPS,” April 1973, INWG 24, McKenzie Collection; Vinton Cerf, “INWG Plenary Meeting, June 7 and June 8,” June 7, 1973, INWG 28, McKenzie Collection; James Pelkey, “Entrepreneurial Capitalism and Innovation: A History of Computer Communications, 1968–1988” (2007), http://www.historyofcomputercommunications.info/Book/6/6.0-Overview.html (accessed September 25, 2013). 33 Hubert Zimmermann, interview by James Pelkey, May 25, 1988, courtesy of James Pelkey. 34 Donald Davies, “CCITT Documents – APV No. 21, 22, 23, 24,” December 1972, INWG 11, McKenzie Collection. 35 Rémi Déspres, oral history interview by Valérie Schafer, May 16, 2012, Paris, France. Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. 36 Vinton G. Cerf and Robert E. Kahn, “A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication,” IEEE Transactions on Communications Com-22 (1974): 637–648. 37 Dave McLimont, “A CCITT Thinkpiece,” January 15, 1974, INWG 45, McKenzie Collection; Donald Davies, “CCITT Contribution by IFIP WG6.1,” August 1974, INWG 69, McKenzie Collection. 38 Vint Cerf, “INWG Meeting in Stockholm, August 10–11, 1974,” April 1, 1974, INWG 53, McKenzie Collection. 39 Cerf, INWG 53; Vint Cerf, “Minutes of the Stockholm Meeting of IFIP WG6.1, August 10–11, 1974 (Aboard the good ship BORE I),” December 20, 1974, INWG 73, McKenzie Collection. 40 Franklin F.

Since every major computer manufacturer was following a proprietary strategy designed to prevent connections between dissimilar systems, the Arpanet represented a government-funded project that sought to compensate for this evident market failure.14 The most distinctive attribute of the Arpanet was its reliance on packet-switching, a new method of transmitting data across telephone lines that had been invented independently in the mid-1960s by Paul Baran at RAND Corporation and Donald Davies at Britain’s National Physical Laboratory (NPL). Where traditional circuit-switched telephone networks required a direct, dedicated connection between users, packet-switched networks broke data into discrete blocks, which Davies dubbed “packets,” that contained basic information about their places of origin and destination.

It was a resounding success – even if utterly baffling to the ten AT&T executives who attended and reportedly declined ARPA’s offer to operate the Arpanet or even purchase it outright.24 The meeting in Washington did more than host the Arpanet’s coming-out party; it also provided an ideal opportunity to invigorate international cooperation. A growing number of networking experiments outside the United States had already begun to take shape, including two significant projects in France and Great Britain. Louis Pouzin, the computer scientist working for IRIA, was designing a packet-switched network called Cyclades; Donald Davies, the computer scientist at Great Britain’s NPL, had begun his packet-switching experiments in the mid-1960s. Additionally, several PTT national monopolies in Europe were evaluating packet-switching technology, and the European Common Market had asked Derek Barber from Britain’s NPL to direct the creation of a European Informatics Network.


pages: 287 words: 86,919

Protocol: how control exists after decentralization by Alexander R. Galloway

Ada Lovelace, airport security, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Bretton Woods, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computer Lib, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, Dennis Ritchie, digital nomad, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Donald Davies, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Free Software Foundation, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, informal economy, John Conway, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, linear programming, macro virus, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Menlo Park, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, OSI model, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, phenotype, post-industrial society, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, semantic web, SETI@home, stem cell, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, telerobotics, The future is already here, the market place, theory of mind, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Review, working poor, Yochai Benkler

Baran tells us that these memoranda “were primarily written on airplanes in the 1960 to 1962 era.” See Paul Baran, Electrical Engineer, an oral history conducted in 1999 by David Hochfelder, IEEE History Center, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA. 7. A term coined instead by British scientist Donald Davies who, unknowing of Baran’s work, also invented a system for sending small packets of information over a distributed network. Both scientists are credited with the discovery; however, because of Baran’s proximity to the newly emerging ARPA network, which would be the first to use Baran’s ideas, Davies’s historical influence has diminished.

It is a vision that provides us with new freedom, and allows us to grow faster than we ever could when we were fettered by the hierarchical classification systems into which we bound ourselves. . . . And it brings the workings of society closer to the workings of our minds.” See Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), pp. 1–2. Berners-Lee’s historical acumen should not be overstated, however, as he elsewhere misspells the names of both Donald Davies and Paul Baran, the two co-inventors of packetswitching (p. 6). But, alas, “academic quality” is a “subjective notion,” he reminds readers (p. 125). 17. Pierre Lévy, Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital Age (New York: Plenum, 1998), p. 16. Chapter 2 60 Machiko Kusahara—“Our culture is undergoing a truly drastic change in terms of our physical and psychological relationship with space and other bodies.”18 Maurizio Lazzarato—“Not, perhaps, since the printing press’s invention has European culture experienced so much upheaval.


pages: 361 words: 81,068

The Internet Is Not the Answer by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bob Geldof, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, computer age, connected car, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, data science, David Brooks, decentralized internet, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Hacker Ethic, happiness index / gross national happiness, holacracy, income inequality, index card, informal economy, information trail, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, libertarian paternalism, lifelogging, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, packet switching, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer rental, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Potemkin village, power law, precariat, pre–internet, printed gun, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, the medium is the message, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, work culture , working poor, Y Combinator

Rather than sending a single message, Baran’s new system broke up this content into many digital pieces, flooding the network with what he called “message blocks,” which would travel arbitrarily across its many nodes and be reassembled by the receiving computer into readable form. Coined as “packet switching” by Donald Davies, a government-funded information scientist at Britain’s National Physical Laboratory, who had serendipitously been working on a remarkably similar set of ideas, the technology was driven by a process Baran called “hot potato routing,” which rapidly sent packets of information from node to node, guaranteeing the security of the message from spies.

There would be a single global information space.44 In 1984, when Berners-Lee returned to CERN and discovered the Internet, he also returned to his larger vision of a single global information space. By this time, he’d discovered the work of Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson and become familiar with what he called “the advances” of technology giants like Donald Davies, Paul Baran, Bob Kahn, and Vint Cerf. “I happened to come along with time, and the right interest and inclination, after hypertext and the Internet had come of age,” Berners-Lee modestly acknowledged. “The task left to me was to marry them together.”45 The fruit of that marriage was the World Wide Web, the information management system so integral to the Internet that many people think that the Web actually is the Internet.


pages: 105 words: 34,444

The Open Revolution: New Rules for a New World by Rufus Pollock

Airbnb, Cambridge Analytica, discovery of penicillin, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, double helix, Free Software Foundation, Hush-A-Phone, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, Live Aid, openstreetmap, packet switching, RAND corporation, Richard Stallman, software patent, speech recognition, tech billionaire

How could the internet be so different? Much of the credit must go to the fact of government funding. The beginnings of the internet were almost entirely paid for by government research funds in the US and to a much smaller extent in the UK (where work at the National Physical Laboratory under Donald Davies was crucial to the development of packet-switching). Even more important was the form of the government funding. Today, ARPA is a legend of what is possible for a public agency. It was staffed by outsiders and free to make bold bets with a minimum of bureaucracy. Funding from ARPA helped to create not only the internet but other aspects of digital life that we now take for granted, from user interfaces to the mouse.


pages: 518 words: 107,836

How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (Information Policy) by Benjamin Peters

Albert Einstein, American ideology, Andrei Shleifer, Anthropocene, Benoit Mandelbrot, bitcoin, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commons-based peer production, computer age, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Davies, double helix, Drosophila, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Gabriella Coleman, hive mind, index card, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, linear programming, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, power law, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, scientific mainstream, scientific management, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, transaction costs, Turing machine, work culture , Yochai Benkler

The Internet, in this sense at least, traces its intellectual sources back to cold war cybernetics. Baran’s network innovations do not arrive without serious institutional and international complication. Although technically on target, Baran’s ideas were not influential until after a foreigner—an Englishman named Donald Davies, with the UK Post backing him—independently discovered and articulated packet switching. Only then did Baran’s superiors in the U.S. military-industrial complex start paying attention to his ideas. In fact, between 1960 and 1966, AT&T repeatedly declined or delayed his proposals to develop digital communication networks.

International communication networks also helped to jumpstart and also consign to limbo local computer network projects. This account highlights three case studies: first, Anatoly Kitov’s discovery of Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics in a secret military library set into motion an internal transition in Soviet scientific discourse; second, Donald Davies and the British Telecom industry prompted the U.S. government to revisit Paul Baran’s RAND research on distributed packet-switching networks; and third, news of the ARPANET going online in 1969 prompted the Politburo to revisit the decade-old OGAS proposal in 1970. In each case, international communication networks (even when they were closed or secret) initially prompted internal institutions to revisit concurrent innovations closer to home.


pages: 500 words: 115,119

Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age by Robert D. Kaplan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Anton Chekhov, Berlin Wall, British Empire, coronavirus, COVID-19, dematerialisation, disinformation, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, geopolitical risk, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, mega-rich, megacity, open borders, Parag Khanna, Pax Mongolica, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, trade route, urban planning

I ask myself. Where does it begin and end? And what will it become? * * * — The questions are becoming clear now. Rimini has started me on an inner journey whose terminus I cannot yet foresee. Skip Notes *1 Stokes’s book is in style and themes replete with Poundian spirit. Donald Davie, Ezra Pound: Poet as Sculptor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1964] 1968), pp. 127–31 and 155–56. *2 Some chroniclers believed that it was only the threat from Persia against the Ottoman Empire that saved Europe from the Ottomans. Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 9

Humphrey Carpenter, A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988), pp. 418–20. Bernard Berenson, “The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance,” 1894, in Italian Painters of the Renaissance, vol. 1, Venetian and North Italian Schools, and vol. 2, Florentine and Central Italian Schools (London: Phaidon, [Preface 1952], 1968). Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet, pp. 42 and 44. Donald Davie, Ezra Pound: Poet as Sculptor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1964] 1968), pp. 85 and 126. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 4 Carpenter, A Serious Character, pp. 418, 420, 225–26, 258–59, and 318. Charles Boer, Charles Olson in Connecticut (Rocky Mount: North Carolina Wesleyan College Press, 1975), p. 78.


pages: 494 words: 142,285

The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World by Lawrence Lessig

AltaVista, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bill Atkinson, business process, Cass Sunstein, commoditize, computer age, creative destruction, dark matter, decentralized internet, Dennis Ritchie, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Erik Brynjolfsson, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, George Gilder, Hacker Ethic, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, history of Unix, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, HyperCard, hypertext link, Innovator's Dilemma, invention of hypertext, inventory management, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kenneth Arrow, Larry Wall, Leonard Kleinrock, linked data, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, new economy, OSI model, packet switching, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, price mechanism, profit maximization, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, smart grid, software patent, spectrum auction, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systematic bias, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, vertical integration, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

As long as they flowed fast enough, and the computers at both ends were quick, the conversation encoded in this packet form would seem just like a conversation along a single virtual wire across the ocean. Baran was probably not the first person to come up with this idea—MIT loyalists insist that that was Leonard Kleinrock.20 And he was also not the only person working on the idea in the early 1960s. Independently, in England, Donald Davies was developing something very similar.21 But whether the first, or the only, doesn't really matter for our purposes here. What is important is that Baran outlined a telecommunications system fundamentally different from the dominant design, and that different telecommunications system would have effected a radically different evolution of telecommunications.

See also John Naughton, A Brief History of the Future: The Origins of the Internet (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999), 92, 118-19 (discussing other earlier contributors to the Internet). 21 Baran attributes to him the discovery of the term. Interview with Paul Baran (“The term 'packet switching' was first used by Donald Davies of the National Physical Laboratory in England, who independently came up with the same general concept in November 1965.”). 22 Baran confirmed this history to me in an interview. “So the first level of objections was about technology—that I didn't understand how the telephone system worked, [and] that what I'm proposing could not possibly work.”


pages: 184 words: 53,625

Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age by Steven Johnson

Airbus A320, airport security, algorithmic trading, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Cass Sunstein, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cognitive dissonance, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Brooks, Donald Davies, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of journalism, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, Jane Jacobs, John Gruber, John Harrison: Longitude, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, mega-rich, meta-analysis, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Occupy movement, packet switching, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, pre–internet, private spaceflight, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, SpaceShipOne, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, techno-determinism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, US Airways Flight 1549, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche, working poor, X Prize, Yochai Benkler, your tax dollars at work

This, too, accentuated the resilience of Baran’s architecture; even the messages themselves were mini-networks of data, with each partial message finding its own way across the broader network. Baran called his approach “distributed adaptive message block switching.” A few years later, the Welsh computer scientist Donald Davies hit upon a similar scheme, independent of Baran. He anointed the message fragments with the slightly more Anglo name of “packets,” and the general approach “packet switching.” The metaphors stuck. Today, the vast majority of data circling around the globe comes in the form of message fragments that we still call packets.


pages: 528 words: 146,459

Computer: A History of the Information Machine by Martin Campbell-Kelly, William Aspray, Nathan L. Ensmenger, Jeffrey R. Yost

Ada Lovelace, air freight, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bletchley Park, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, Build a better mousetrap, Byte Shop, card file, cashless society, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, deskilling, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Jenner, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, garden city movement, Gary Kildall, Grace Hopper, Herman Kahn, hockey-stick growth, Ian Bogost, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, linked data, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Multics, natural language processing, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, optical character recognition, packet switching, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pirate software, popular electronics, prediction markets, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Robert X Cringely, Salesforce, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the market place, Turing machine, Twitter Arab Spring, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, young professional

Unknown to Roberts, a solution to the first two problems had already been invented. Known as “store-and-forward packet switching,” the idea was first put forward by Paul Baran of the RAND Corporation in 1961 and was independently reinvented in 1965 at the National Physical Laboratory in England by Donald Davies, who coined the term packet switching. Davies recognized the packet-switching concept to be similar to an older telegraph technology. In telegraph networks, engineers had already solved the problem of how to avoid having every city connected to every other. Connectivity was achieved by using a number of switching centers located in major cities.

In effect, by enabling many users to share a communications line simultaneously, packet switching did for telecommunications what time-sharing had done for computing. All of this was unknown to Roberts until he attended an international meeting of computer network researchers in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, in October 1967. There he learned of the packet-switching concept from one of Donald Davies’s English colleagues. He later described this as a kind of revelation: “Suddenly I learned how to route packets.” The final problem that remained for Roberts was how to avoid the horrendous software problems of getting the different computers to handle the network traffic. Fortunately, just as Roberts was confronting this problem, the first minicomputers had started to enter the market and the solution came to him in a eureka moment in a taxicab ride: the interface message processor (IMP).


pages: 226 words: 59,080

Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science by Dani Rodrik

airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, bank run, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bretton Woods, business cycle, butterfly effect, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collective bargaining, congestion pricing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, distributed generation, Donald Davies, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, fudge factor, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, liquidity trap, loss aversion, low skilled workers, market design, market fundamentalism, minimum wage unemployment, oil shock, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, price elasticity of demand, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, public intellectual, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, risk/return, Robert Shiller, school vouchers, South Sea Bubble, spectrum auction, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, trade route, ultimatum game, University of East Anglia, unorthodox policies, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, white flight

To avoid the problem that men who choose to join the army may be inherently different from those who do not, Angrist used the Vietnam War–era draft lottery, which had created random recruitment. He found that men who had served in the early 1970s ended up earning about 15 percent less a decade later than men who had never served.15 Columbia University economists Donald Davis and David Weinstein used the US bombing of Japanese cities during the Second World War to test two models of city growth. One model was based on scale economies (decline in production costs as urban density increased), and the other was based on locational advantages (such as access to a natural seaport).


The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal by M. Mitchell Waldrop

Ada Lovelace, air freight, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apple II, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, Byte Shop, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Ritchie, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, experimental subject, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, functional programming, Gary Kildall, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, information retrieval, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Rulifson, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Leonard Kleinrock, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Multics, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, popular electronics, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, The Soul of a New Machine, Turing machine, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Von Neumann architecture, Wiener process, zero-sum game

Except that shortly thereafter, an Englishman named Roger Scantlebury got up to give a paper on a system being developed by Donald Davies's telecommu- nications research group at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in Tedding- ton, outside London-and proceeded to describe essentially the same idea: packets, IMPs, distributed control, the works. What the. . . ? The story, as Scantlebury would explain it to the disconcerted Roberts later that day, was both ironic and sad. The irony was that Donald Davies had got- ten his original inspiration when he was hosting a conference on time-sharing back in late 1965 and fell into an impromptu discussion about networking with J.

That wasn't a category that included much on IPTO's agenda-not Project MAC, not Engelbart's center, and certainly not the network. With the technical design for the network still in draft form at that point, the entire effort could eas- ily have been stopped right there, leaving Larry Roberts just as thoroughly stymied by the bureaucracy as Donald Davies and Paul Baran had been before him. And yet somehow it didn't happen. ARPA's computing program continued to lead its charmed life, rather like a person sleepwalking through a battlefield without getting a scratch. One reason was DDR&E Johnny Foster, who resisted any and all attempts to focus ARPA's efforts purely on Vietnam.


pages: 221 words: 59,755

Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future by Elizabeth Kolbert

Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, big-box store, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, Donald Davies, double helix, Hernando de Soto, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jacob Silverman, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, lockdown, Maui Hawaii, moral hazard, negative emissions, ocean acidification, Stewart Brand, The Chicago School, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

A poem commemorating the Corps’ efforts declared: The plan was an engineer masterpiece Fashioned by experts, a grand bas-relief Levees, floodways, and other improvements Blended into a project beneficent. Thanks to the “project beneficent,” the crevasse period came to an end. But with the end of river flooding came an end to fresh sediment. In the succinct formulation of Donald Davis, a geographer at LSU: “The Mississippi River was controlled; land was lost; the environment changed.” CPRA’s “bold” scheme for saving Plaquemines is to rehabilitate the crevasse for a post-crevasse age. The agency’s master plan calls for punching eight giant holes through the levees on the Mississippi and two more through those on its main distributary, the Atchafalaya.


Economic Gangsters: Corruption, Violence, and the Poverty of Nations by Raymond Fisman, Edward Miguel

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, blood diamond, clean water, colonial rule, congestion charging, crossover SUV, Donald Davies, European colonialism, failed state, feminist movement, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, mass immigration, megacity, oil rush, prediction markets, random walk, Scramble for Africa, selection bias, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, unemployed young men

But we can reasonably assume that the number of still-active explosives in any given location is very closely related to the quantity of bombs that were dropped there during the war. 4. The U.S. Department of Energy page contains a discussion; see: http://www.cfo.doe.gov/me70/manhattan/hiroshima.htm and http://www.cfo.doe.gov/me70/manhattan/nagasaki.htm (last visited March 29, 2008). 5. Donald Davis and David Weinstein (2002). “Bones, Bombs, and Breakpoints: The Geography of Economic Activity,” American Economic Review, 92(5). 6. Districts are administrative units similar to U.S. counties; a district typically contains several hundred villages. 7. For the curious reader, this result didn’t change in the analysis when we measured bombing intensity in different ways, looked at larger administrative units (provinces instead of districts), and used statistical “control” variables, like prewar population density and geographic factors; see Miguel and Roland (2006), “The Long Run Impact of Bombing Vietnam”, NBER Working Paper #11954, for the details. 8.


pages: 257 words: 66,480

Strange New Worlds: The Search for Alien Planets and Life Beyond Our Solar System by Ray Jayawardhana

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Arthur Eddington, Boeing 747, cosmic abundance, dark matter, Donald Davies, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, fake news, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, Late Heavy Bombardment, Louis Pasteur, Neil Armstrong, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper

Theoretical calculations show that capture into orbit is highly unlikely: if a Moon-size body were to come near the Earth, it’s a lot more likely to have either hit the Earth directly or received a gravity kick that set it fying off into space. In the early 1970s, two sets of theorists—one consisting of Alistair Cameron and William Ward at Harvard and the other of William Hartmann and Donald Davis of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson— independently suggested that the Moon formed from the debris of a giant impact that the Earth had with a Mars-size roaming planet. But it took nearly a decade before planetary scientists widely accepted that catastrophic impacts had been common in the early solar system.


pages: 314 words: 83,631

Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet by Andrew Blum

air freight, cable laying ship, call centre, digital divide, Donald Davies, global village, Hibernia Atlantic: Project Express, if you build it, they will come, inflight wifi, invisible hand, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Leonard Kleinrock, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mercator projection, messenger bag, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, New Urbanism, packet switching, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, satellite internet, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, undersea cable, urban planning, UUNET, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

In 1961, while a graduate student at MIT, he published the first paper on “packet switching,” the idea that data could be transmitted efficiently in small chunks rather than a continuous stream—one of the key notions behind the Internet. The idea was already in the air. A professor at the British National Physical Laboratory named Donald Davies had, unbeknownst to Kleinrock, been independently refining similar concepts, as had Paul Baran, a researcher at the RAND Corporation in Los Angeles. Baran’s work, begun in 1960 at the request of the US Air Force, was explicitly aimed at designing a network that could survive a nuclear attack. Davies, working in an academic setting, merely wanted to improve England’s communications system.


Applied Cryptography: Protocols, Algorithms, and Source Code in C by Bruce Schneier

active measures, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, dark matter, Donald Davies, Donald Knuth, dumpster diving, Dutch auction, end-to-end encryption, Exxon Valdez, fault tolerance, finite state, heat death of the universe, information security, invisible hand, John von Neumann, knapsack problem, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Multics, NP-complete, OSI model, P = NP, packet switching, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, seminal paper, software patent, telemarketer, traveling salesman, Turing machine, web of trust, Zimmermann PGP

Mallory intercepts the message, decrypts PB with his private key, re-encrypts it with Alice’s public key, and sends it on to her. (4) Alice decrypts PB and verifies that it is correct. (5) Bob decrypts PA and verifies that it is correct. Alice and Bob see nothing different. However, Mallory knows both PA and PB. Donald Davies and Wyn Price describe how the interlock protocol (described in Section 3.1) can defeat this attack [435]. Steve Bellovin and Michael Merritt discuss ways to attack this protocol [110]. If Alice is a user and Bob is a host, Mallory can pretend to be Bob, complete the beginning steps of the protocol with Alice, and then drop the connection.

Other researchers showed that publicly known design principles could be used to generate S-boxes with the observed characteristics [266]. Additional Results There were other attempts to cryptanalyze DES. One cryptographer looked at nonrandomness based on spectral tests [559]. Others analyzed sequences of linear factors, but their attack failed after eight rounds [1297,336,531]. A 1987 unpublished attack by Donald Davies exploited the way the expansion permutation repeats bits into adjacent S-boxes; this attack is also impractical after eight rounds [172,429]. 12.4 Differential and Linear Cryptanalysis Differential Cryptanalysis In 1990, Eli Biham and Adi Shamir introduced differential cryptanalysis [167,168,171,172].

The most important keys, those used to generate the actual encryption keys, are stored in this module. These keys can never be read once they are stored. And they are tagged by use: A key dedicated for one purpose cannot accidentally be used for another. This concept of key control vectors is probably the most significant contribution of this system. Donald Davies and William Price discuss this key management protocol in detail [435]. A Variation A variation on this scheme of master and session keys can be found in [1478]. It’s built around network nodes with key notarization facilities that serve local terminals. It is designed to: — Secure two-way communication between any two terminal users. — Secure communications using encrypted mail. — Provide personal file protection. — Provide a digital signature capability.


pages: 378 words: 94,468

Drugs 2.0: The Web Revolution That's Changing How the World Gets High by Mike Power

air freight, Alexander Shulgin, banking crisis, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, cloud computing, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, Donald Davies, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, drug harm reduction, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, fiat currency, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, frictionless, fulfillment center, Haight Ashbury, independent contractor, John Bercow, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Leonard Kleinrock, means of production, Menlo Park, moral panic, Mother of all demos, Network effects, nuclear paranoia, packet switching, pattern recognition, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, pre–internet, QR code, RAND corporation, Satoshi Nakamoto, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sexual politics, Skype, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, trade route, Whole Earth Catalog, Zimmermann PGP

The acronymic utopias enabled by internet technologies such as TCP/IP aren’t so different from those offered by LSD: equality, connectedness, awareness of life as a sum greater than its parts. In the early 1960s, American computer scientist Leonard Kleinrock of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Paul Baran of the Rand Corporation, and, later, Britain’s Donald Davies, a physician at the UK’s National Physical Library in Teddington, independently conceived of the same way to send data around a telephone network efficiently by splitting it into chunks and routing it through nodes around the network to later arrive, reassembled, in the right place. These deliberate first steps towards cyberspace had a greater impact on the history of mankind than the simple stroll on a rock high above our heads two years later.


pages: 300 words: 94,628

Hooked: Food, Free Will, and How the Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions by Michael Moss

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", big-box store, Donald Davies, Drosophila, epigenetics, hydroponic farming, Internet Archive, means of production, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Upton Sinclair, Wayback Machine

deal with this ruse “Guidance for Industry: Scientific Evaluation of the Evidence on the Beneficial Physiological Effects of Isolated or Synthetic Non-Digestible Carbohydrates Submitted as a Citizen Petition” (21 CFR 10.30), docket no. FDA-2016-DF-3401, FDA, February 2018. wrote for the journal Roger Williams, “Concept of Genetotrophic Disease,” Nutrition Reviews 8 (1950): 257–60. See also Donald Davis et al., “Roger J. Williams, 1893–1988,” National Academy of Sciences, 2008. Some of the people Bruno Estour et al., “Constitutional Thinness and Anorexia Nervosa: A Possible Misdiagnosis?” Frontiers in Endocrinology 5 (2014); Bruno Estour to author. Not only did they fail N. Germain et al., “Specific Appetite, Energetic and Metabolomics Responses to Fat Overfeeding in Resistant-to-Bodyweight-Gain Constitutional Thinness,” Nutrition and Diabetes 4 (2014): 1-8.


pages: 285 words: 98,832

The Premonition: A Pandemic Story by Michael Lewis

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, deep learning, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, double helix, energy security, facts on the ground, failed state, gentleman farmer, global supply chain, illegal immigration, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, out of africa, precautionary principle, QAnon, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, stem cell, tech bro, telemarketer, the new new thing, working poor, young professional

His first pick was Richard Hatchett, another doctor who had stopped treating patients and moved into government service. Richard belonged to a dying species: the romantic southern man of letters who travels north and there makes an uneasy home for himself. He’d grown up in Daphne, Alabama, and in 1985 had gone off to Vanderbilt University, where his poetry caught the eye of the eminent poets in residence Donald Davie and Mark Jarman. They’d picked him to represent Vanderbilt at a national collegiate poetry competition, in which he finished second. A judge, the future Pulitzer Prize–winning Irish poet Paul Muldoon, singled out one of his poems as the work of a young poet of promise. When asked why, instead of pursuing a career as a poet, he had gone to medical school, Richard would say simply, “Writing is too hard.”


pages: 395 words: 116,675

The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge by Matt Ridley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, adjacent possible, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, altcoin, An Inconvenient Truth, anthropic principle, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Broken windows theory, carbon tax, Columbian Exchange, computer age, Corn Laws, cosmological constant, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, Donald Davies, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Eben Moglen, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Snowden, endogenous growth, epigenetics, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fail fast, falling living standards, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, George Santayana, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, hydraulic fracturing, imperial preference, income per capita, indoor plumbing, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, land reform, Lao Tzu, long peace, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Necker cube, obamacare, out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, smart contracts, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, twin studies, uber lyft, women in the workforce

Given all we know about the ubiquitous phenomenon of simultaneous invention, and the inevitability of the next step in innovation once a technology is ripe (see Chapter 7), it is inconceivable that the twentieth century would have ended without a general, open means of connecting computers to each other so that people could see what was on other nodes than their own hard drive. Indeed, the notion of packet switching – and even the name we now use for it – occurred independently to a Welshman named Donald Davies just a short time after Baran stumbled on it. Vint Cerf shares the credit for TCP/IP with Bob Kahn. So, while we should honour individuals for their contributions, we should not really think that they made something come into existence that would not have otherwise. The names would be different, and some of the procedures too, but an alternative internet would exist today whoever had lived.


pages: 302 words: 82,233

Beautiful security by Andy Oram, John Viega

Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, Bletchley Park, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, corporate governance, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, defense in depth, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, Firefox, information security, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, market design, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Leeson, Norbert Wiener, operational security, optical character recognition, packet switching, peer-to-peer, performance metric, pirate software, Robert Bork, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, security theater, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, SQL injection, statistical model, Steven Levy, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Upton Sinclair, web application, web of trust, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

Many historians attribute the victory in the Second World War directly to the code breakers at Bletchley Park who deciphered the famous Enigma machine, yet even this monumental technological event, which ended the World War and changed history forever, may pale into insignificance next to changes to come. The packet switching network invented by Donald Davies in 1970 also changed the world forever when the sudden ability of computers to talk to other computers with which they previously had no relationship opened up new possibilities for previously isolated computing power. Although the early telegraph networks almost a century before may have aroused the dream of an electronically connected planet, it was only in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s that we started to wire the world together definitively with copper cables and later with fiber-optic technology.


pages: 463 words: 118,936

Darwin Among the Machines by George Dyson

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, backpropagation, Bletchley Park, British Empire, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Danny Hillis, Donald Davies, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, finite state, IFF: identification friend or foe, independent contractor, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, launch on warning, low earth orbit, machine readable, Menlo Park, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, pattern recognition, phenotype, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, spectrum auction, strong AI, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, zero-sum game

“In a very short period of time—within the past decade, the research effort devoted to these ends has developed from analyses of how a mechanical mouse might find his way out of a maze, to suggestions of the design of an all-electronic world-wide communications system,” he wrote in 1964.54 Baran christened his technique “adaptive message block switching,” abbreviated to “packet switching” in 1966 by Donald Davies, working independently at the U.K. National Physical Laboratory. The first order of business was to take all forms of communicable information—text, data, graphics, voice—and break it up into short strings of bits of uniform length. To the network, all forms of communication would look the same.


Hacking Capitalism by Söderberg, Johan; Söderberg, Johan;

Abraham Maslow, air gap, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Debian, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, Donald Davies, Eben Moglen, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, frictionless, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, IBM and the Holocaust, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of radio, invention of the telephone, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Ken Thompson, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Mitch Kapor, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, patent troll, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, profit motive, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, safety bicycle, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, software patent, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Whole Earth Catalog, Yochai Benkler

Chant, Sources for the Study of Science, Technology and Everyday Life 1870–1950—A Secondary Reader (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1988). 3. For a detailed summary of the background history of the Internet, see John Naughton, A Brief History of the Future—The Origins of the Internet (London: Phoenix, 2000). 4. Note that this is not the Marxist writer Paul Baran. 5. Less known is Donald Davies, a British scientist who also worked on a digital communication network and even got a prototype up and running. Janet Abbate, “Cold War and White Heat: The Origins and Meanings of Packet Switching” in ed. Donald MacKenzie and Judy Wajcman, The Social Shaping of Technology, 2nd edition (Buckingham: Philadelphia, Pa: Open University Press 1999). 6.


pages: 481 words: 121,669

The Invisible Web: Uncovering Information Sources Search Engines Can't See by Gary Price, Chris Sherman, Danny Sullivan

AltaVista, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Bill Atkinson, bioinformatics, Brewster Kahle, business intelligence, dark matter, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, full text search, HyperCard, hypertext link, information retrieval, Internet Archive, it's over 9,000, joint-stock company, knowledge worker, machine readable, machine translation, natural language processing, pre–internet, profit motive, Project Xanadu, publish or perish, search engine result page, side project, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Ted Nelson, Vannevar Bush, web application

Justquotes.com is a great example of a site that serves both as a useful pathfinder to specific (namely investing) Invisible Web resources, but that saves the time of the researcher by pre-configuring what amounts to custom searches with the stock symbol of interest to the searcher. To paraphrase the popular television commercial, “No search engine gonna do all that.” Case 8 – The Invisible Web Fails to Deliver! Donald Davis feels very familiar and comfortable with the visible and Invisible Web. He has read numerous articles on the subject and knows his way around many of the better Invisible Web pathfinders. In fact, he recently accessed some key economic statistics via the Invisible Web. Donald is trying to track down several newspaper articles for a business proposal he is writing and feels confident that his knowledge of the Invisible Web will come in very handy.


The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy From Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography by Simon Singh

Bletchley Park, Charles Babbage, Donald Davies, friendly fire, information security, Leo Hollis, Mikhail Gorbachev, old-boy network, operational security, quantum cryptography, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, Simon Singh, Turing machine, unbiased observer, undersea cable, Zimmermann PGP

I am also grateful to David Deutsch and Michele Mosca of the Oxford Centre for Quantum Computation, Charles Bennett and his research group at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Laboratories, Stephen Wiesner, Leonard Adleman, Ronald Rivest, Paul Rothemund, Jim Gillogly, Paul Leyland and Neil Barrett. Derek Taunt, Alan Stripp and Donald Davies kindly explained to me how Bletchley Park broke Enigma, and I was also helped by the Bletchley Park Trust, whose members regularly give enlightening lectures on a variety of topics. Dr. Mohammed Mrayati and Dr. Ibrahim Kadi have been involved in revealing some of the early breakthroughs in Arab cryptanalysis, and were kind enough to send me relevant documents.


Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing (Writing Science) by Thierry Bardini

Apple II, augmented reality, Bill Duvall, Charles Babbage, classic study, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, experimental subject, Grace Hopper, hiring and firing, hypertext link, index card, information retrieval, invention of hypertext, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Rulifson, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Leonard Kleinrock, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Multics, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, packet switching, Project Xanadu, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Silicon Valley, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Ted Nelson, the medium is the message, theory of mind, Turing test, unbiased observer, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture

Paul Baran invented the technique for telephony at RAND, and the term "packet" was used for the first time in connection with computer networks by Davies In 1966. Baran et al. (1964), Roberts (1988,144). 5. Roberts reported that "some of the [RAND] reports were classified as not In the public domaIn. Therefore, neither Donald Davies nor I had seen anything of the work until we were deep into the design of our respective systems. The RAND work was very detailed. . . . Their hot-potato routing algorIthm was a useful starting point for the ARPANET routIng design" (19 88 , 147). 6. Norberg and O'Neill report that Roberts thought at first that "a committee cannot be expected to investigate and solve the more difficult, longer range problems, 25 8 Notes to Chapter 7 particularly when the best solution may requIre considerable efforts for some of the members'1 (1996, 169).


pages: 464 words: 127,283

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia by Anthony M. Townsend

1960s counterculture, 4chan, A Pattern Language, Adam Curtis, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Apple II, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Big Tech, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Burning Man, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, charter city, chief data officer, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, company town, computer age, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Donald Davies, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Evgeny Morozov, food desert, game design, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, Haight Ashbury, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, jitney, John Snow's cholera map, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, load shedding, lolcat, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), openstreetmap, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, place-making, planetary scale, popular electronics, power law, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, scientific management, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social software, social web, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, undersea cable, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, working poor, working-age population, X Prize, Y2K, zero day, Zipcar

There were indeed real concerns about the survivability of military communications networks. But RAND was just one of several research groups that were broadly rethinking communications networks at the time—parallel efforts on distributed communications were being led by Lawrence Roberts at MIT and Donald Davies and Roger Scantlebury at the United Kingdom’s National Physical Laboratory. Each of the three efforts remained unaware of each other until a 1967 conference organized by the Association for Computing Machinery in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, where Roberts met Scantlebury, who by then had learned of Baran’s earlier work.17 And ARPANET wasn’t a military command network for America’s nuclear arsenal, or any arsenal for that matter.


pages: 661 words: 156,009

Your Computer Is on Fire by Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks, Kavita Philip

"Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital divide, digital map, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, fake news, financial innovation, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, hiring and firing, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Multics, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, postindustrial economy, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Salesforce, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, telepresence, the built environment, the map is not the territory, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, union organizing, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, Y2K

(Perhaps the limits of contemporary open-source politics—such as the radical transparency of WikiLeaks and the private cipher that is Julian Assange—follow the limits of Cold War mutual intelligibility.) AT&T, the near analogue to a state network monopoly at the time, also rejected Baran’s proposal to develop digital networks, fearing digital networks would bring them into competition against their own services.32 And so Baran’s research languished until an Englishman named Donald Davies, with the support of the UK post office, independently developed network innovations similar to Baran.33 Only then, in 1966, under the pressure of an outside organization to which the national government felt compelled to respond (an ally nation backed by another hefty state media monopoly), did Baran’s superiors feel pressured to revisit and reclaim his team’s network research for ARPA under J.


pages: 561 words: 157,589

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us by Tim O'Reilly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, book value, Bretton Woods, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, DevOps, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disinformation, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, gravity well, greed is good, Greyball, Guido van Rossum, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, Lean Startup, Leonard Kleinrock, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, microbiome, microservices, minimum viable product, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, OSI model, Overton Window, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, software as a service, software patent, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strong AI, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the map is not the territory, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, VA Linux, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, zero-sum game, Zipcar

But add the idea of fitness functions and a fitness landscape to his insight that simple systems are able to evolve in ways that surprise their creators and you have a powerful tool for seeing and understanding how computer networks and marketplaces work. The Internet itself proves the point. In the 1960s, Paul Baran, Donald Davies, Leonard Kleinrock, and others had developed a theoretical alternative called packet switching to the circuit-switched networks that had characterized the telephone and telegraph. Rather than creating a physical circuit between the two endpoints for the duration of a communication, messages are broken up into small, standardized chunks, shipped by whatever route is most convenient for each packet, and reassembled at their destination.


pages: 496 words: 162,951

We Were Soldiers Once...and Young: Ia Drang - the Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam by Harold G. Moore, Joseph L. Galloway

back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, defense in depth, Donald Davies, drop ship, friendly fire, machine readable, South China Sea

Lieutenants Bill Riddle, the forward observer with John Herren's Bravo Company, and Tim Blake, who was killed with Tony Nadal's Alpha Company, were on loan to us from Barker's Battery C. Also located in Falcon were the six big guns of Battery A, 1st of the 21st Artillery, commanded by Captain Donald Davis, twenty-eight, a native Ohioan. The brave cannon-cockers in LZ Falcon went without sleep for three days and nights to help keep us surrounded by a wall of steel. Those two batteries, twelve guns, fired more than four thousand rounds of high-explosive shells on the first day alone. Says Barker, "On the first afternoon both batteries fired for effect [directly on target] for five straight hours."


pages: 743 words: 201,651

Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World by Timothy Garton Ash

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, activist lawyer, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrew Keen, Apple II, Ayatollah Khomeini, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Clapham omnibus, colonial rule, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, digital divide, digital rights, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Etonian, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, Firefox, Galaxy Zoo, George Santayana, global village, Great Leap Forward, index card, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, megacity, mutually assured destruction, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Open Library, Parler "social media", Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, semantic web, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Snapchat, social graph, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Streisand effect, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tipper Gore, trolley problem, Turing test, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Yochai Benkler, Yom Kippur War, yottabyte

It changed its name to Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 1971, back to ARPA in 1993, then back to DARPA in 1996. See Internet Society, ‘Brief History of the Internet’, http://perma.cc/SNY8-TYAE 50. David Clark, quoted in Paulina Borsook, ‘How Anarchy Works’, Wired, http://perma.cc/9XXM-PKKX 51. Mueller 2004, 74–75 52. the British scientist was Donald Davies; see Hafner et al. 2006, 67. For TCP/IP see the discussion in Mueller 2004, 5–7 53. this was certainly the case with Paul Baran at the Rand Corporation; see Hafner et al. 2006, 54–64 54. see Zittrain 2008, 31–33, and Wu 2010, 201–2. The cyberlaw expert Tim Wu is credited with coining the term; see Wu 2003.


The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History by David Edgerton

active measures, Arthur Marwick, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, blue-collar work, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, centre right, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, company town, Corn Laws, corporate governance, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, deskilling, Donald Davies, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, endogenous growth, Etonian, European colonialism, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, full employment, gentrification, imperial preference, James Dyson, knowledge economy, labour mobility, land reform, land value tax, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Kinnock, new economy, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, packet switching, Philip Mirowski, Piper Alpha, plutocrats, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, post-truth, post-war consensus, public intellectual, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, technological determinism, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, trade liberalization, union organizing, very high income, wages for housework, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working poor

It spent around £100,000 on supporting research in universities and £3 milion on development (building and operating pilot plants) and technical service, of which £1 million and 900 workers (300 graduates) were on technical service.57 In fact, the 1960s and 1970s were a moment of creativity in British state and industry in smaller-scale activities away from the glare of state policy and often connected internationally. For example, in the 1960s in the STC (the British subsidiary of ITT) laboratories in Essex Charles K. Kao, born in China, trained in Hong Kong and the United Kingdom, devised the fibre-optic cable, for which he much later won a Nobel Prize. Also in the 1960s Donald Davies of the National Physical Laboratory developed packet-switching, a key element of the internet. Sir Geoffrey Houndsfield of EMI developed the CT-scanner, introduced in the 1970s, and Sir Peter Mansfield of Nottingham University invented MRI imaging, also introduced in the 1970s. Neither had been to Oxford or Cambridge, very unusually for Nobel Prize winners, as they too became.


Engineering Security by Peter Gutmann

active measures, address space layout randomization, air gap, algorithmic trading, Amazon Web Services, Asperger Syndrome, bank run, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Brian Krebs, business process, call centre, card file, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, combinatorial explosion, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Debian, domain-specific language, Donald Davies, Donald Knuth, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, false flag, fault tolerance, Firefox, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, glass ceiling, GnuPG, Google Chrome, Hacker News, information security, iterative process, Jacob Appelbaum, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Conway, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, Laplace demon, linear programming, litecoin, load shedding, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Multics, Network effects, nocebo, operational security, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, post-materialism, QR code, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, random walk, recommendation engine, RFID, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, rolling blackouts, Ruby on Rails, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, semantic web, seminal paper, Skype, slashdot, smart meter, social intelligence, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain attack, telemarketer, text mining, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Market for Lemons, the payments system, Therac-25, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Wayback Machine, web application, web of trust, x509 certificate, Y2K, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

“Accountable Certificate Management using Undeniable Attestations”, Ahto Buldas, Peeter Land and Helger Lipmaa, Proceedings of the 7th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS 2000), November 2000, p.9. “Security for Computer Networks : An Introduction to Data Security in Teleprocessing and Electronic Funds Transfer”, Donald Davies and W.Price, John Wiley and Sons, 1984. “Beyond Identity: Warranty-Based Digital Signature Transactions”, Yair Frankel, David Kravitz, Charles Montgomery and Moti Yung, Proceedings of the 2nd Financial Cryptography Conference (FC’98), Springer-Verlag LNCS No.1465, February 1998, p.241. “Oasis Digital Signature Services: Digital Signing without the Headaches”, Nick Pope and Juan Carlos Cruellas, IEEE Internet Computing, Vol.10, No.6 (September/October 2006), p.81.