Special Guest Blogger: Donald Davies

Before the internet, if you wanted to upset everyone, you’d have to go round to them one by one, but now you can do it in seconds, just by tweeting something you thought was funny because you were drunk. The internet’s sped everything up. I remember when you used to order something from the shops and it would take two days. Now it gets delivered straight away, while you’re out, and goes direct to the Post Office, where you can collect it in 48 hours but that all changed one day in 1966.
I was responsible for the reason you are currently reading this on your phone while ignoring your spouse. I’m the guy who helped invent modern data communications and the reason you can stream high-definition cat videos at 3AM and you’re welcome, I suppose.
Before I was busy reinventing the very architecture of human connectivity, I was just a young sprout working at the National Physical Laboratory. In 1936, Alan Turing who was a man whose brain was roughly the size of a planet, wrote his seminal paper, On Computable Numbers, and I don’t know if you’ve ever had the pleasure of pointing out a math error to a certified genius but to point out some mistakes in his logic, well Alan was, to put it mildly, annoyed.
My thinking was if you’re going to build a global network that essentially becomes the central nervous system of human civilization, you probably shouldn't leave any cracks.
Back in the mid-sixties, computers were the size of small barns and had the processing power of a nervous calculator and communication was a nightmare. Then, my team and I at the NPL had a bit of a Eureka! moment.
We realized that if you want to send data, you shouldn't just shove a giant block of information down a wire and hope it doesn’t get lost, instead, chop the message into tiny, manageable pieces and we called them packets.
We envisioned these little data-orphans being routed independently across a network, all taking different paths, dodging traffic, and eventually reuniting at the destination to reassemble themselves like some kind of digital puzzle.
My work didn't stay in the NPL. It drifted across the Atlantic to influence the ARPANET in the U.S., and hopped over to the CYCLADES project in France and it grew into the beautiful packet-switching global juggernaut it is today.
Many people think that the internet is just clicking a button and a cat video appears but they don’t see the invisible, global, high-speed choreography of packets zipping through fiber-optic cables under the ocean floor, reassembling themselves in milliseconds.
They don't think about the math, the logic, or the fact that I spent the better part of the 60s arguing with people about why we shouldn't keep building centralised networks that would crash the moment a single mouse chewed through a wire.
But mostly, I feel bad that I gave the world the infrastructure for total, instant, global communication along with the ability to access the sum total of human knowledge from the palm of your hand. And with that power, what have you done?
You’ve mostly used it to argue with strangers in the comments sections of blogs and share photos of what we had for lunch.
My own personal final packet arrived in May 2000 at the age of 75 but thankfully, nobody tried to reassemble me.