Roger Scantlebury

Roger Anthony Scantlebury (born August 1936) is a British computer scientist and Internet pioneer who worked at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) and later at Logica.

Scantlebury led the pioneering work to implement packet switching and associated communication protocols at the NPL in the late 1960s. He proposed the use of the technology in the ARPANET, the forerunner of the Internet, at the inaugural Symposium on Operating Systems Principles in 1967. During the 1970s, he was a major figure in the International Network Working Group through which he was an early contributor to concepts used in the Transmission Control Program which became part of the Internet protocol suite.

Early life

Roger Scantlebury was born in Ealing in 1936.

Career

National Physical Laboratory

Scantlebury worked at the National Physical Laboratory in south-west London, in collaboration with the National Research Development Corporation (NRDC). His early work was on the Automatic Computing Engine and English Electric DEUCE computers.[1]

Following this he was tasked by Derek Barber to lead the implementation of Donald Davies' pioneering packet switching concepts for data communication.[2] Scantlebury and Keith Bartlett were the first to describe the term protocol in a modern data-communications context in an April 1967 memorandum entitled A Protocol for Use in the NPL Data Communications Network.[3][4][5][6][7] In October 1967, he attended the Symposium on Operating Systems Principles in the United States, where he gave an exposition of packet-switching, developed at NPL (and referenced the work of Paul Baran).[8][9][10] Also attending the conference was Larry Roberts, from the ARPA; this was the first time that Larry Roberts had heard of packet switching.[11][12] Scantlebury persuaded Roberts and other American engineers to incorporate the concept into the design for the ARPANET.[13][14][15][16][17][18]

Subsequently he led the development of the NPL Data Communications Network,[4][19] publishing several research papers pioneering the development of packet-switched computer networks.[20][21] Elements of the network became operational in early 1969,[22][23] the first implementation of packet switching,[24][25] and the NPL network was the first to use high-speed links.[4][26] He was seconded to the Post Office Telecommunications in 1969, participating in a data communications study and supervising four data communications-related research contracts.[27] This research team developed the alternating bit protocol (ABP).[28][29]

Along with Davies and Barber, he was a major figure in the International Network Working Group (INWG) from 1972, initially chaired by Vint Cerf.[30][31][32] He attended the INWG meeting in New York in June 1973 that shaped the early direction of international network protocols,[32][33] and was acknowledged by Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf in their seminal 1974 paper on internetworking, A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication.[34] He co-authored the standard agreed by INWG in 1975, Proposal for an international end to end protocol.[32][35]

Scantlebury later reported directly to Davies at the NPL.[36] As head of the data networks group within the Computer Science Division, he was responsible for the UK technical contribution to the European Informatics Network, a datagram network linking CERN, the French research centre INRIA and the UK’s National Physical Laboratory.[1][37][38]

Later career

Scantlebury joined Logica in 1977 in their Communications Division,[1] where he worked on the CCITT (ITU-T) X.25 protocol and with the formation of the Euronet, a pan-European virtual circuit network using X.25.[39][40] He moved to the Finance Division in 1981.[1]

In the 2000s, he worked for Mercator Software, Integra SP and as a consultant.[41][42][36] Subsequently, he worked for Kofax (now Tungsten Automation) and retired in 2020.

Personal life

Scantlebury married Christine Appleby in 1958 in Middlesex; they had two sons in 1961 and 1966, and a daughter in 1963. He lives in Esher.

He was influential in persuading NPL to sponsor a gallery about "Technology of the Internet" at The National Museum of Computing, which opened in 2009.[43]

Publications

  • Davies, D. W.; Bartlett, K. A.; Scantlebury, R. A.; Wilkinson, P. T. (October 1967). A digital communications network for computers giving rapid response at remote terminals. ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles.
  • Wilkinson, P.T.; Scantlebury, R.A. (1968). The control functions in a local data network. IFIP Congress (2) 1968: 734-738.
  • Scantlebury, R. A.; Wilkinson, P.T.; Bartlett, K.A. (1968). The design of a message switching centre for a digital communication network. IFIP Congress (2) 1968: 723-727.
  • Scantlebury, R. A. (1969). A model for the local area of a data communication network objectives and hardware organization. Symposium on Problems in the Optimization of Data Communications Systems 1969: 183-204
  • Bartlett, Keith A.; Scantlebury, Roger A.; Wilkinson, Peter T. (1969). A note on reliable full-duplex transmission over half-duplex links. Commun. ACM 12(5): 260-261.
  • Scantlebury, R. A.; Wilkinson, P.T. (1971). The design of a switching system to allow remote access to computer services by other computers and terminal devices. Proceedings of the 2nd Symposium on Problems in the Optimization of Data Communications Systems. pp. 160–167.
  • Scantlebury, R. A.; Wilkinson, P.T. (1974). The National Physical Laboratory Data Communications Network. Proceedings of the 2nd ICCC 74. pp. 223–228.
  • Cerf, V.; McKenzie, A; Scantlebury, R; Zimmermann, H (1976). "Proposal for an international end to end protocol". ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review. 6: 63–89. doi:10.1145/1015828.1015832. S2CID 36954091.

See also

References

  1. ^ a b c d Communications Standards: State of the Art Report 14:3
  2. ^ "Computer pioneer interactive family tree". 2 February 2010. Retrieved 5 June 2024.
  3. ^ Naughton, John (2015). A Brief History of the Future. Orion. ISBN 978-1-4746-0277-8.
  4. ^ a b c Cambell-Kelly, Martin (1987). "Data Communications at the National Physical Laboratory (1965-1975)". Annals of the History of Computing. 9 (3/4): 221–247. doi:10.1109/MAHC.1987.10023. S2CID 8172150.
  5. ^ Pelkey, James L. "6.1 The Communications Subnet: BBN 1969". Entrepreneurial Capitalism and Innovation: A History of Computer Communications 1968–1988. As Kahn recalls: ... Paul Baran's contributions ... If you look at what he wrote, he was talking about switches that were low-cost electronics. The idea of putting powerful computers in these locations hadn't quite occurred to him as being cost effective. So the idea of computer switches was missing. The whole notion of protocols didn't exist at that time. And the idea of computer-to-computer communications was really a secondary concern.
  6. ^ Kleinrock, L. (1978). "Principles and lessons in packet communications". Proceedings of the IEEE. 66 (11): 1320–1329. doi:10.1109/PROC.1978.11143. ISSN 0018-9219. Paul Baran ... focused on the routing procedures and on the survivability of distributed communication systems in a hostile environment, but did not concentrate on the need for resource sharing in its form as we now understand it; indeed, the concept of a software switch was not present in his work.
  7. ^ Waldrop, M. Mitchell (2018). The Dream Machine. Stripe Press. p. 286. ISBN 978-1-953953-36-0. Baran had put more emphasis on digital voice communications than on computer communications.
  8. ^ Murray, Andrew (12 March 2007). The Regulation of Cyberspace: Control in the Online Environment. Routledge. ISBN 9781135310745 – via Google Books.
  9. ^ Hafner, Katie; Lyon, Matthew (21 January 1998). Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet. Simon and Schuster. ISBN 9780684832678 – via Google Books.
  10. ^ "On packet switching". Net History. Retrieved 8 January 2024. [Scantlebury said] We referenced Baran's paper in our 1967 Gatlinburg ACM paper. You will find it in the References. Therefore I am sure that we introduced Baran's work to Larry (and hence the BBN guys).
  11. ^ Feder, Barnaby J. (4 June 2000). "Donald W. Davies, 75, Dies; Helped Refine Data Networks". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 9 November 2019 – via NYTimes.com.
  12. ^ at 14:10, Richard Speed 29 Oct 2019. "Are you coming to the party dressed as an IMP? ARPANET @ 50". www.theregister.co.uk. Retrieved 9 November 2019.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  13. ^ Abbate, Janet (2000). Inventing the Internet. MIT Press. ISBN 9780262511155 – via Google Books.
  14. ^ Naughton, John (2015). A Brief History of the Future: The origins of the Internet. Hachette. ISBN 978-1474602778. they lacked one vital ingredient. Since none of them had heard of Paul Baran they had no serious idea of how to make the system work. And it took an English outfit to tell them. ... Larry Roberts paper was the first public presentation of the ARPANET concept as conceived with the aid of Wesley Clark ... Looking at it now, Roberts paper seems extraordinarily, well, vague.
  15. ^ Waldrop, M. Mitchell (2018). The Dream Machine. Stripe Press. pp. 285–6. ISBN 978-1-953953-36-0. Scantlebury and his companions from the NPL group were happy to sit up with Roberts all that night, sharing technical details and arguing over the finer points.
  16. ^ "Oral-History:Donald Davies & Derek Barber". Retrieved 13 April 2016. the ARPA network is being implemented using existing telegraphic techniques simply because the type of network we describe does not exist. It appears that the ideas in the NPL paper at this moment are more advanced than any proposed in the USA
  17. ^ Barber, Derek (Spring 1993). "The Origins of Packet Switching". The Bulletin of the Computer Conservation Society (5). ISSN 0958-7403. Retrieved 6 September 2017. Roger actually convinced Larry that what he was talking about was all wrong and that the way that NPL were proposing to do it was right. I've got some notes that say that first Larry was sceptical but several of the others there sided with Roger and eventually Larry was overwhelmed by the numbers.
  18. ^ Needham, Roger M. (1 December 2002). "Donald Watts Davies, C.B.E. 7 June 1924 – 28 May 2000". Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. 48: 87–96. doi:10.1098/rsbm.2002.0006. S2CID 72835589. Larry Roberts presented a paper on early ideas for what was to become ARPAnet. This was based on a store-and-forward method for entire messages, but as a result of that meeting the NPL work helped to convince Roberts that packet switching was the way forward.
  19. ^ technicshistory (2 June 2019). "ARPANET, Part 2: The Packet". Creatures of Thought. Retrieved 21 June 2024.
  20. ^ A History of the ARPANET: The First Decade (PDF) (Report). Bolt, Beranek & Newman Inc. 1 April 1981. pp. 54–55. Archived from the original on 1 December 2012.
  21. ^ "Publications and Conference Papers - Data Communications at the National Physical Laboratory - History of Computing Collection: National Physical Laboratory Collection - Archives Hub". archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk. Retrieved 21 January 2024.
  22. ^ Hempstead, C.; Worthington, W., eds. (2005). Encyclopedia of 20th-Century Technology. Routledge. pp. 573–5. ISBN 978-1-135-45551-4. Retrieved 15 August 2015.
  23. ^ Rayner, David; Barber, Derek; Scantlebury, Roger; Wilkinson, Peter (2001). NPL, Packet Switching and the Internet. Symposium of the Institution of Analysts & Programmers 2001. Archived from the original on 7 August 2003. Retrieved 13 June 2024. The system first went 'live' early in 1969
  24. ^ John S, Quarterman; Josiah C, Hoskins (1986). "Notable computer networks". Communications of the ACM. 29 (10): 932–971. doi:10.1145/6617.6618. S2CID 25341056. The first packet-switching network was implemented at the National Physical Laboratories in the United Kingdom. It was quickly followed by the ARPANET in 1969.
  25. ^ Haughney Dare-Bryan, Christine (22 June 2023). Computer Freaks (Podcast). Chapter Two: In the Air. Inc. Magazine. 35:55 minutes in. Leonard Kleinrock: Donald Davies ... did make a single node packet switch before ARPA did
  26. ^ "Alan Turing and the Ace computer". 5 February 2010. Retrieved 5 June 2024. The NPL network ran at multi-megabit speeds in the late 1960s, faster than any network at the time.
  27. ^ Smith, Ed; Miller, Chris; Norton, Jim (2017). "Packet Switching: The first steps on the road to the information society". National Physical Laboratory.
  28. ^ Davies, Donald Watts (1979). Computer networks and their protocols. Internet Archive. Chichester, [Eng.]; New York : Wiley. pp. 206. ISBN 9780471997504.
  29. ^ Naughton, John (24 September 2015). A Brief History of the Future. Orion. ISBN 9781474602778 – via Google Books.
  30. ^ "Smithsonian Oral and Video Histories: Vinton Cerf". National Museum of American History. Smithsonian Institution. 24 April 1990. Retrieved 23 September 2019. Roger Scantlebury was one of the major players. And Donald Davies who ran, at least he was superintendent of the information systems division or something like that. I absolutely had a lot of interaction with NPL at the time. They in fact came to the ICCC 72 and they had been coming to previous meetings of what is now called Datacomm. Its first incarnation was a long title having to do with the analysis and optimization of computer communication networks, or something like that. This started in late 1969, I think, was when the first meeting happened in Pine Hill, Georgia. I didn't go to that one, but I went to the next one that was at Stanford, I think. That's where I met Scantlebury, I believe, for the first time. Then I had a lot more interaction with him. I would come to the UK fairly regularly, partly for IFIP or INWG reasons
  31. ^ Andrew L. Russell (30 July 2013). "OSI: The Internet That Wasn't". IEEE Spectrum. Vol. 50, no. 8.
  32. ^ a b c McKenzie, Alexander (2011). "INWG and the Conception of the Internet: An Eyewitness Account". IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. 33 (1): 66–71. doi:10.1109/MAHC.2011.9. ISSN 1934-1547. S2CID 206443072. Perhaps the only historical difference that would have occurred if DARPA had switched to the INWG 96 protocol is that rather than Cerf and Kahn being routinely cited as "fathers of the Internet," maybe Cerf, Scantlebury, Zimmermann, and I would have been.
  33. ^ Isaacson, Walter (2014). The innovators : how a group of hackers, geniuses, and geeks created the digital revolution. Internet Archive. New York : Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-1-4767-0869-0.
  34. ^ Cerf, V.; Kahn, R. (1974). "A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication" (PDF). IEEE Transactions on Communications. 22 (5): 637–648. doi:10.1109/TCOM.1974.1092259. ISSN 1558-0857. The authors wish to thank a number of colleagues for helpful comments during early discussions of international network protocols, especially R. Metcalfe, R. Scantlebury, D. Walden, and H. Zimmerman; D. Davies and L. Pouzin who constructively commented on the fragmentation and accounting issues; and S. Crocker who commented on the creation and destruction of associations.
  35. ^ Cerf, V.; McKenzie, A; Scantlebury, R; Zimmermann, H (1976). "Proposal for an international end to end protocol". ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review. 6: 63–89. doi:10.1145/1015828.1015832. S2CID 36954091.
  36. ^ a b "IET/BCS talk: The Internet - Where it came from & where it is going". talks.cam.ac.uk. 15 November 2007. Retrieved 21 June 2024.
  37. ^ A, BarberD L. (1 July 1975). "Cost project 11". ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review. 5 (3): 12–15. doi:10.1145/1015667.1015669. S2CID 28994436.
  38. ^ "EIN (European Informatics Network)". Computer History Museum. Retrieved 3 February 2020.
  39. ^ Dunning, A.J. (31 December 1977). "Origins, development and future of the Euronet". Program. 11 (4). Emeraldinsight.com: 145–155. doi:10.1108/eb046759.
  40. ^ Kerssens, Niels (13 December 2019). "Rethinking legacies in internet history: Euronet, lost (inter)networks, EU politics". Internet Histories. 4: 32–48. doi:10.1080/24701475.2019.1701919. ISSN 2470-1475.
  41. ^ Scantlebury, Roger (2001). A Brief History of the NPL Network. Symposium of the Institution of Analysts & Programmers 2001. Archived from the original on 7 August 2003. Retrieved 13 June 2024.
  42. ^ Hempstead, C.; Worthington, W., eds. (2005). Encyclopedia of 20th-Century Technology. Vol. 1, A–L. Routledge. pp. xxx. ISBN 9781135455514. It was a seminal meeting
  43. ^ "Technology of the Internet". The National Museum of Computing. Retrieved 3 October 2017.

Further reading