Roger Scantlebury

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

Scantlebury participated in pioneering work to develop 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 an active member of the International Network Working Group through which he contributed to concepts used in 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 worked with Donald Davies on his pioneering packet switching concepts. Scantlebury is one of the first people 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" written with Keith Bartlett. ^{[2] [3] [4]} 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). ^{[5] [6] [7]} Also attending the conference was Larry Roberts, ^[8] from the ARPA; this was the first time that Larry Roberts had heard of packet switching. ^[9] Scantlebury persuaded Roberts and other American engineers to incorporate the concept into the design for the ARPANET. ^{[10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15]}

Subsequently he worked on development of the NPL Data Communications Network, ^[3] publishing many research papers pioneering the development of packet-switched computer networks. ^{[16] [17]} He was seconded to the Post Office Telecommunications in 1969, participating in a data communications study and supervising four data communications-related research contracts. ^[18] This research team developed the alternating bit protocol (ABP). ^{[19] [20]}

Along with Donald Davies and Derek Barber he participated in the International Networking Working Group (INWG) from 1972, initially chaired by Vint Cerf. ^{[21] [22]} He was acknowledged by Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf in their seminal 1974 paper on internetworking, "A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication", ^[23] and he co-authored the standard agreed by the INWG in 1975, "Proposal for an international end to end protocol". ^[24]

Later, 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] [25] [26]}

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 virtual circuit network using X.25. ^{[27] [28]} He moved to the Finance Division in 1981. ^[1]

In the early 2000s, he worked for Integra SP. ^[29]

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. ^[30]

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

• History of the Internet
• Internet in the United Kingdom § History
• List of Internet pioneers
• Protocol Wars

References

1. Communications Standards: State of the Art Report 14:3
2. Naughton, John (2015). A Brief History of the Future. Orion. ISBN   978-1-4746-0277-8.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. Murray, Andrew (12 March 2007). The Regulation of Cyberspace: Control in the Online Environment. Routledge. ISBN   9781135310745 – via Google Books.
6. 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.
7. "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).
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. Abbate, Janet (2000). Inventing the Internet. MIT Press. ISBN   9780262511155 – via Google Books.
11. 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.
12. 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.
13. "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
14. 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.
15. 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.
16. 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.
17. "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.
18. Smith, Ed; Miller, Chris; Norton, Jim (2017). "Packet Switching: The first steps on the road to the information society". National Physical Laboratory.
19. Davies, Donald Watts (1979). Computer networks and their protocols . Internet Archive. Chichester, [Eng.]; New York : Wiley. pp.  206. ISBN   9780471997504.
20. Naughton, John (24 September 2015). A Brief History of the Future. Orion. ISBN   9781474602778 – via Google Books.
21. Andrew L. Russell (30 July 2013). "OSI: The Internet That Wasn't". IEEE Spectrum . Vol. 50, no. 8.
22. 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.
23. 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.
24. 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.
25. 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.
26. "EIN (European Informatics Network)". Computer History Museum. Retrieved 3 February 2020.
27. Dunning, A.J. (31 December 1977). "Origins, development and future of the Euronet". Program. Emeraldinsight.com. 11 (4): 145–155. doi:10.1108/eb046759.
28. 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.
29. 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
30. "Technology of the Internet". The National Museum of Computing. Retrieved 3 October 2017.

Further reading

• Campbell-Kelly, Martin (1987). "Data Communications at the National Physical Laboratory (1965-1975)". IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. 9 (3): 221–247. doi:10.1109/MAHC.1987.10023. S2CID   8172150.

External links

• Internet Dreamers BBC interview with Vint Cerf, Bob Taylor, Larry Roberts and Roger Scantlebury, 2000
• Celebrating 40 years of the net BBC News article quoting Roger Scantlebury, 2009
• 'Packet switching' system's first computer network BBC News interview with Roger Scantlebury, 2010
• Alan Turing and the Ace computer, BBC News series on British computer pioneers, 2010
• The Story of Packet Switching, Interview with Roger Scantlebury, Peter Wilkinson, Keith Bartlett, and Brian Aldous, 2011
• Protocol Wars, Interview with Roger Scantlebury for the Computer History Museum, 2011
• Internet pioneers airbrushed from history, Letter to the Guardian, 2013
• The birth of the Internet in the UK, Google video featuring Vint Cerf, Roger Scantlebury, Peter Kirstein, Peter Wilkinson, 2013
• The Joy of Data BBC Four program featuring an interview with Roger Scantlebury, 2016
• How we nearly invented the internet in the UK Letter to the New Scientist, 2020
• Fifty Years of the Internet Technology Event featuring Roger Scantlebury at The National Museum of Computing, 2020