[Air-L] ARPANET resurrection update and possible significances?

Mon Apr 27 10:05:10 PDT 2026

Thanks so much for this review of history.

On Mon, Apr 27, 2026 at 12:43 PM Morten Bay <mortench at usc.edu> wrote:

> Hi Peter,
>
> The invention of packet switching has been a hotly debated question for
> more than a quarter of a century now. I published some research
> <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/24701475.2018.1544726> on
> this a few years ago, but there's a small contingent of Brits who want to
> claim this invention as British and are ignoring the scholarship that says
> otherwise (not just my work, but the work of most actual Internet
> historians), so I always feel a need to set the record straight.
>
> The fact is that not even Donald Davies claimed that he invented packet
> switching. Paul Baran of the RAND Corporation was the first to come up with
> the idea of splitting up data blocks, providing a mechanism for them to
> navigate the network in a distributed fashion, and then reassembling them
> at their destination. He called it "Hot Potato Routing", and the purpose of
> it was to avoid congestion and increase speed.
>
> This happened in the 1960-1961 timeframe, when Baran was working on a
> computer network design for the U.S. Air Force at RAND. After handing over
> the design to the Air Force (who insisted on building the network without
> RAND, subsequently failed and then shelved the project), Baran took the
> non-classified parts of the Air Force briefing and published them in 1962.
> Eventually, he assembled all of his network studies in a single publication
> in 1964.
>
> Davies - independently of Baran - came up with a similar idea in 1965, and
> presented it to colleagues at NPL that year. At the presentation, a
> military person with knowledge of Baran's work came up to him and informed
> him that the idea had already been around for 4-5 years. Davies then
> contacted Baran to learn more. In their discussions, they found that
> Davies' name for the principle  - "packet switching" - was much better than
> "Hot Potato Routing", and so from then on, Baran adopted that term too.
>
> While all of this was happening, Leonard Kleinrock was a doctoral student
> at MIT working on data block/message queuing in computer systems. In the
> 1961-1962 period, he *also* came up with (and published) the idea of
> adjusting the size of data blocks and later re-appending them post-routing
> to avoid congestion and increase speed.
>
> As Baran once told me in an interview
> <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/24701475.2017.1345469>,
> ideas like packet switching emerge and "become ripe" in research and
> whoever is the first to "invent" something is almost beside the point.
> Packet switching as an idea came up in at least three people's heads
> totally independent of each other within a 5-year period.
>
> It's what happened next that gets people all worked up. Once Davies had
> consulted with Baran, NPL began actually implementing packet switching in a
> machine. The Brits claim that packet networking (and therefore, the early
> Internet) began in early 1969 when NPL and Davies' team built the first
> machine that could use the packet switching principle.
>
> The problem is that it was a "one-node network", essentially a star
> network, or a server with a number of terminals. It was therefore not
> really a big network innovation at all, since, at this point, similarly
> structured systems had been in place as time-sharing systems in the U.S.
> since 1961 - almost a decade earlier. The difference, of course, is that
> time-sharing systems share resources on the same computer, while the Mark I
> "network" at NPL had a computer as a connection hub. But I have never been
> able to find any evidence that NPL was able to connect *different*
> computers to that hub, only terminals and computers of the same make and
> model - which essentially makes it a local server network, not a computer
> network.
>
> Getting computers of *different makes and models* to communicate using
> packet switching was the main contribution of the ARPANET and is what paved
> the way for the Internet. The Brits claim they achieved this a few months
> before the ARPANET team, but I still have yet to see evidence of it - given
> the homogeniety of the machines connected to the NPL Mark I hub.
>
> Additionally:
> In 1966, Larry Roberts was hired by the aforementioned Bob Taylor at
> ARPA/IPTO to design the ARPANET and get it built. He began work on this in
> early 1967, leaning on a number of experts, not least his old friend and
> MIT classmate Leonard Kleinrock. By October 1967, almost everything was in
> place, Roberts just couldn't figure out how to avoid congestion and get the
> ARPANET to be fast enough to actually be useful.
>
> Roberts presented the plans for the ARPANET, including the
> congestion/speed challenge at a conference in Tennessee October 4-5 1967.
> Representatives from Davies' team at NPL were also there to present their
> one-node packet network findings. They told Roberts about Baran's work and
> Roberts then went back to D.C. and looked through Baran's publications.
>
> Just four days after the end of that conference, an ARPANET design meeting
> was held where they agreed to explore Baran's packet switching principle.
> Notably, Davies' work is not mentioned in the minutes from that meeting.
>
> Roberts asked Kleinrock and Elmer Shapiro to get in touch with Baran to
> explore this further, and there is documentation of them meeting and
> working on how packet switching could be implemented in the ARPANET. Based
> on his own work and his and Shapiro's conversations with Baran, Kleinrock
> convinced Roberts that it would work.
>
> This is how packet switching ended up being the main routing principle in
> the RFQ that went out to the industry in 1968, a bidding round that was
> eventually won by Bolt, Beranek and Newman (whose team would end up
> contributing even more to the actual implementation of packet switching in
> the ARPANET.) The first router (or IMP) was delivered to Kleinrock's lab in
> September 1969, another was delivered a few days later to SRI in Palo Alto,
> and on October 29, 1969 the two were connected for the first time. The rest
> is...well, you know.
>
> So, Davies did not invent packet switching (other than the name) himself,
> and he never made that claim. He DID claim to have created the first packet
> switched network, and his team continues to claim this, even though, as far
> as I can see, they never connected different computers.
>
> Furthermore, Davies spent the last years of his life arguing that
> Kleinrock did not have a claim to the invention of packet switching, going
> as far as writing an article about it to be published posthumously. But
> when you look more closely at what was actually implemented in the ARPANET,
> it was a lot closer to Baran's and Kleinrock's packetization ideas than
> Davies'.
>
> And Kleinrock is, importantly, the intellectual bridge between Baran and
> the ARPANET design team, and the one who ensured that packet switching
> became the basis for the ARPANET when nobody believed that it was even
> possible to do.
>
> So, nobody "invented" packet switching, really. It came about as direct
> and indirect collaborations between three people who came up with the idea
> independently within a few years of each other.
>
> Incidentally, using flip-flop relays (now transistors) in computers was an
> idea that similarly appeared, independently, in the heads of George
> Stibitz, Vincent Atanasoff, and Konrad Zuse around the same timeframe of
> 1937-1938.
>
> Maybe one day we'll find out how our brains work in this regard, but I
> just find it fascinating.
>
> - Morten
>
>
> Morten Bay, Ph.D.
> Lecturer
> Research fellow, Center for the Digital Future
> Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism
> University of Southern California
> On Apr 26, 2026 at 6:20 PM -0700, Peter Timusk via Air-L <
> air-l at listserv.aoir.org>, wrote:
>
> Hello I just read the idea of packets was invented by a British
> mathematician and brought to ARPANET by a coworker at a conference. Donald
> Davies (UK): Proposed a national commercial data network and introduced the
> term "packet". On
> Hello I just read the idea of packets was invented by a British
> mathematician and brought to ARPANET by a coworker at a conference.
> Donald Davies (UK): Proposed a national commercial data network and
> introduced the term "packet".
>
> On Sun, Apr 26, 2026, 7:41 p.m. Jacob Johanssen via Air-L <
> air-l at listserv.aoir.org> wrote:
>
>> ELIZA has been "reconstructed" for some time now, see here:
>> https://sites.google.com/view/elizaarchaeology/home
>> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://sites.google.com/view/elizaarchaeology/home__;!!LIr3w8kk_Xxm!pZnuIKRAVP4o6tuMvSM3qjkTSOV8hBin3jDwWFj6oyP5eQtRzj1OauVGnCG07W8DbY8QKsLTjDUCdZYdXA$>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sun, 26 Apr 2026, 18:31 Peter Gloviczki via Air-L, <
>> air-l at listserv.aoir.org> wrote:
>>
>>> Thanks Charles for sharing all this.
>>>
>>> It reminded me of Licklider & Taylor's seminal paper:
>>> https://internetat50.com/references/Licklider_Taylor_The-Computer-As-A-Communications-Device.pdf
>>> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://internetat50.com/references/Licklider_Taylor_The-Computer-As-A-Communications-Device.pdf__;!!LIr3w8kk_Xxm!pZnuIKRAVP4o6tuMvSM3qjkTSOV8hBin3jDwWFj6oyP5eQtRzj1OauVGnCG07W8DbY8QKsLTjDXfBs7Jdg$>
>>>
>>> Fondly, Peter
>>> [image: email graphic]
>>> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://www.wiu.edu/__;!!LIr3w8kk_Xxm!pZnuIKRAVP4o6tuMvSM3qjkTSOV8hBin3jDwWFj6oyP5eQtRzj1OauVGnCG07W8DbY8QKsLTjDWw1zSpuQ$>
>>> *Peter Joseph Gloviczki, Ph.D. *Professor
>>> School of Communication and Media
>>> Western Illinois University
>>> 1 University Circle, Macomb, IL 61455
>>> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.google.com/maps/search/1*University*Circle,*Macomb,*IL*61455?entry=gmail&source=g__;KysrKys!!LIr3w8kk_Xxm!pZnuIKRAVP4o6tuMvSM3qjkTSOV8hBin3jDwWFj6oyP5eQtRzj1OauVGnCG07W8DbY8QKsLTjDXQ7F_Mmw$>
>>> Schedule a meeting via Calendly:
>>> https://calendly.com/pj-gloviczki/30min
>>> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://calendly.com/pj-gloviczki/30min__;!!LIr3w8kk_Xxm!pZnuIKRAVP4o6tuMvSM3qjkTSOV8hBin3jDwWFj6oyP5eQtRzj1OauVGnCG07W8DbY8QKsLTjDUdkXSl8Q$>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Sun, Apr 26, 2026 at 4:52 AM Charles Melvin Ess via Air-L <
>>> air-l at listserv.aoir.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hi AoIRists,
>>>>
>>>> As I mentioned in an earlier note to Morten Bay, there is an active
>>>> project to recreate the ARPANET from ca. 1972. You can see the update
>>>> here:
>>>>
>>>> <https://obsolescence.dev/arpanet_home
>>>> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://obsolescence.dev/arpanet_home__;!!LIr3w8kk_Xxm!pZnuIKRAVP4o6tuMvSM3qjkTSOV8hBin3jDwWFj6oyP5eQtRzj1OauVGnCG07W8DbY8QKsLTjDV2xslVbg$>
>>>> >
>>>>
>>>> Including the chance to log in yourself to one of the now 35 working
>>>> nodes.
>>>>
>>>> One of the documents referenced here is titled
>>>>
>>>> SCENARIOS for using the ARPANET at the INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON
>>>> COMPUTER COMMUNICATION, Washington, D.C., October 24-26, 1972
>>>>
>>>> and is in fact reproduced in the pages giving further instructions on
>>>> logging in - along with 2026 scenarios that might also be fun to play
>>>> with.
>>>>
>>>> One of the available programs from the MIT.AI
>>>> <https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://MIT.AI__;!!LIr3w8kk_Xxm!pZnuIKRAVP4o6tuMvSM3qjkTSOV8hBin3jDwWFj6oyP5eQtRzj1OauVGnCG07W8DbY8QKsLTjDV8Ojm1lg$>
>>>> node is:
>>>> ==
>>>> DOCTOR is a LISP program written by Joseph Weizenbaum and described in
>>>> "ELIZA - A Computer Program For the Study of Natural Language
>>>> Communication Between Man And Machine" in the Communications of the ACM,
>>>> January 1966.
>>>> DOCTOR simulates a psychiatric interview with a Rogerian
>>>> psychotherapist.
>>>> ==
>>>> (I'll come back to this below.)
>>>>
>>>> I know that ARPANET is central to the work of e.g.,Janet Abbate's early
>>>> history, _Inventing the Internet_ (1999).
>>>> But what I'm asking here, especially of historians who know these
>>>> domains far better than I:
>>>> 1) how far did these early exchanges, so far as they could be followed
>>>> and/or documented - and/or, as at least some study of primary aims,
>>>> practices, affordances, etc. might have been possible - enter into early
>>>> research on CMC?
>>>> 2) Might this reconstruction project, insofar as it grants access to
>>>> "the rest of us," be of possible use / interest for historical / current
>>>> research on CMC and its descendants?
>>>> E.g., I know a great deal has been written about ELIZA - but, to my
>>>> knowledge at least, not with direct access to the working program
>>>> itself. I suspect the working program would give researchers a chance to
>>>> not only become much more familiar with how the program works and
>>>> "behaves," but also to try out hypotheses as to how different sorts of
>>>> engagements, expectations, etc. might be dis/confirmed through actually
>>>> using it?
>>>>
>>>> In any case, to quote the welcome message from the first terminal I
>>>> tried: Happy Hacking!
>>>>
>>>> - charles
>>>> _______________________________________________
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