Donald Davies

Donald Davies was a British computer scientist at the National Physical Laboratory who in the mid-1960s independently invented packet switching, the technique of breaking data into small, separately addressed packets for transmission across a shared network, and coined the term packet switching itself. His work was developed independently of, not derived from, the related research Paul Baran was carrying out around the same time in the United States, and Daviess NPL network was among the first practical demonstrations of the technique, later influencing the design of the ARPANET.