Donald Davies

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Donald Watts Davies CBE FRS (June 7, 1924 – May 28, 2000) was a British computer scientist who was a co-inventor of packet switching (and originator of the term), along with Paul Baran and Leonard Kleinrock in the US.

Just prior to Davies' death, he contested Kleinrock's views on the importance of Kleinrock's contributions. Kleinrock and Davies were certainly on the same track and there is a correspondence from Kleinrock to Davies conceding that "Packet Switching" was a suitable term for the concept.

Davies was born in Treorchy in the Rhondda Valley, Wales. He received BSc degrees in physics (1943) and mathematics (1947) at Imperial College London. In 1955, he married Diane Burton.

He worked at the National Physical Laboratory at Teddington just outside London. From 1947, he worked with Alan Turing on the Pilot ACE computer and indeed spotted mistakes in Turing's seminal 1936 paper On Computable Numbers, much to Turing's annoyance. These were perhaps some of the first "programming" errors in existence, even if they were for a theoretical computer, the universal Turing machine. He headed the NPL Autonomic Division from 1966 and worked on computer network security from the late 1970s.