Recently I have heard of a new As or A level computing course that I want to try and find out more about as a Governor with a special interest in Engineering and Technology.
Today 8 July 2015 I read about an announcement of a new BBC computer using Scratch from MIT I think. I will have to see if my school has a link with a middle school where I can get involved and learn about this. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-33409311
5 January 2016:
This new BBC Micro Bit has been delayed yet again.
4 April. Maybe it is out now:
http://www.techradar.com/news/computing/bbc-micro-bit-10-things-you-need-to-know-1298581
Wednesday 8 July 2015
Data comm-s packet Switching in Bournemouth
I was talking to my friend Russ ( http://btckstorage.blob.core.windows.net/site8867/Journals/2006/J06%20Pg%2037-39.pdf) at Stewarts (http://www.stewarts.co.uk/our-garden-centres/coffe-shop/coffee-shop-broomhill/) the other morning about my life in Data Comms, and he was telling me that there had been an early meeting about something to do with the development of Packet Switching in Bournemouth. I am trying to find out something about that. So far, because of my reading about Turing after we had seen the movie about him, I did come across a reference to one of the pioneers in packet switching who also worked on the ACE machine in Manchester with Turing: http://www.rutherfordjournal.org/article040101.html#davies
Donald Davies is acknowledged to be the inventor of packet switching.
Russ mentioned a guy called Ray Henville at Blandford Camp, but as yet I cannot tie them together.
I have found a Kevin Ray Henville born 1959 who is interested in Antique radios as Russ is, and one who worked on early computers at Irton Moor, who must have been significantly older.
So, keep digging.
http://www.livinginternet.com/i/iw_packet_inv.htm
from Wikipedia:
And Lawrence Roberts I recognize, I think it is possible that he was in Telenet corporation. Here is his writeup on it: http://www.packet.cc/files/ev-packet-sw.html
This report is US biased I think: http://ethw.org/Packet_Switching
This report is about the UK Network created at NPL:
http://www.computer.org/cms/Computer.org/Computer.org/ComputingNow/computingthen/atty/1988/CT_1988-1_DataCommunications.pdf
It used the Plessey XL-12 initially whose successor was built at Plessey Christchurch, so there may have been discussions in Bournemouth.
Here's more about Donald Davies: http://ethw.org/Oral-History:Donald_Davies_%26_Derek_Barber
I like this comment from here:
Donald would probably know more about that, But what I was trying to say was that because of that coming together of one big department, they wanted to focus amongst other things the computing industry. And that's why, when we tried to use the Plessey latest machine [for the NPL network], which just would have been ideal, we were told, "No, the Ministry policy is: we want to support ICL, you will not use that, you don't have to use that, etc." And of course when we wrote down the spec and looked around, the next best machine was a Honeywell 516. If we had gone for the Plessey XL-12, which was actually a much better machine, architecturally, than the 516, the whole story could have been quite different. But such is the way decisions are made in ministries.
A last compendium: http://rogerdmoore.ca/PS/
From the book "Intercept" about computing, cryptography and spying, it states that Donald Davies wrote a paper on packet switching and when the US designed theirs for Arpanet, his document was well thumbed and worn.
Donald Davies is acknowledged to be the inventor of packet switching.
Russ mentioned a guy called Ray Henville at Blandford Camp, but as yet I cannot tie them together.
I have found a Kevin Ray Henville born 1959 who is interested in Antique radios as Russ is, and one who worked on early computers at Irton Moor, who must have been significantly older.
So, keep digging.
http://www.livinginternet.com/i/iw_packet_inv.htm
from Wikipedia:
The concept of switching small blocks of data was first explored independently by Paul Baran at the RAND Corporation in the US and Donald Davies at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in the UK in the early to mid-1960s.Abbate 2000
Leonard Kleinrock conducted early research in queueing theory which proved important in packet switching, and published a book in the related field of digital message switching (without the packets) in 1961; he also later played a leading role in building and management of the world's first packet-switched network, the ARPANET.
Baran developed the concept of message block switching during his research at the RAND Corporation for the US Air Force into survivable communications networks, first presented to the Air Force in the summer of 1961 as briefing B-265[3] then published as RAND Paper P-2626 in 1962 and then including and expanding somewhat within a series of eleven papers titled On Distributed Communications in 1964. Baran's P-2626 paper described a general architecture for a large-scale, distributed, survivable communications network. The paper focuses on three key ideas: first, use of a decentralized network with multiple paths between any two points; and second, dividing complete user messages into what he called message blocks (later called packets); then third, delivery of these messages by store and forward switching.
Baran's study made its way to Robert Taylor and J.C.R. Licklider at the Information Processing Technology Office, both wide-area network evangelists, and it helped influence Lawrence Roberts to adopt the technology when Taylor put him in charge of development of the ARPANET.
Baran's work was similar to the research performed independently by Donald Davies at the National Physical Laboratory, UK. In 1965, Davies developed the concept of packet-switched networks and proposed development of a UK wide network.[4] He gave a talk on the proposal in 1966, after which a person from the Ministry of Defence (MoD) told him about Baran's work. A member of Davies' team (Roger Scantlebury) met Lawrence Roberts at the 1967 ACMSymposium on Operating System Principles, bringing the two groups together. Scantlebury urged Roberts to use the highest speeds possible to reduce latency.
Davies had chosen some of the same parameters for his original network design as Baran, such as a packet size of 1024 bits. In 1966 Davies proposed that a network should be built at the laboratory to serve the needs of NPL and prove the feasibility of packet switching. The NPL Data Communications Network entered service in 1970. Roberts and the ARPANET team took the name "packet switching" itself from Davies's work.
The first computer network and packet switching network deployed for computer resource sharing was the Octopus Network at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory that began connecting four Control Data 6600 computers to several shared storage devices (including an IBM 2321 Data Cell[5] in 1968 and an IBM Photostore[6] in 1970) and to several hundred Teletype Model 33 ASR terminals for time sharing use starting in 1968.[7]
In 1973, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn wrote the specifications for Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), an internetworking protocol for sharing resources using packet-switching among the nodes.
And Lawrence Roberts I recognize, I think it is possible that he was in Telenet corporation. Here is his writeup on it: http://www.packet.cc/files/ev-packet-sw.html
This report is US biased I think: http://ethw.org/Packet_Switching
This report is about the UK Network created at NPL:
http://www.computer.org/cms/Computer.org/Computer.org/ComputingNow/computingthen/atty/1988/CT_1988-1_DataCommunications.pdf
It used the Plessey XL-12 initially whose successor was built at Plessey Christchurch, so there may have been discussions in Bournemouth.
Here's more about Donald Davies: http://ethw.org/Oral-History:Donald_Davies_%26_Derek_Barber
I like this comment from here:
Donald would probably know more about that, But what I was trying to say was that because of that coming together of one big department, they wanted to focus amongst other things the computing industry. And that's why, when we tried to use the Plessey latest machine [for the NPL network], which just would have been ideal, we were told, "No, the Ministry policy is: we want to support ICL, you will not use that, you don't have to use that, etc." And of course when we wrote down the spec and looked around, the next best machine was a Honeywell 516. If we had gone for the Plessey XL-12, which was actually a much better machine, architecturally, than the 516, the whole story could have been quite different. But such is the way decisions are made in ministries.
A last compendium: http://rogerdmoore.ca/PS/
From the book "Intercept" about computing, cryptography and spying, it states that Donald Davies wrote a paper on packet switching and when the US designed theirs for Arpanet, his document was well thumbed and worn.
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