Arpanet, Part 2: The Packet

Arpanet, Part 2: The Packet

On the way home one of his colleagues suggested they hold a seminar on time-sharing to inform the British computing community about the new techniques that they had learned about in the U.S. Davies agreed, and played host to a number of major figures in American computing, among them Fernando Corbató (creator of the Compatible Time-Sharing System at MIT), and Larry Roberts himself. Likewise, by slicing up each message into standard-sized pieces which Davies called “packets,” a single communications channel could be shared by multiple computers or multiple users of a single computer. The most advanced telephone networks were then on the verge of computerizing their switching systems, and Davies proposed building packet-switching into that next-generation telephone network, thereby creating a single wide-band communications network that could serve a wide variety of uses, from ordinary telephone calls to remote computer access.

Source: technicshistory.wordpress.com