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1 The packet switching network

1.1 People and computers

When computers started to become business tools and to assume an
essential role in all companies, they were very large both physically and
in terms of capital and revenue cost. Indeed, when erecting a new building
the company would have to design features especially for the computer.
A big room to house it, separate power supplies, large air-conditioning
plants, and hoisting gear to lift the bits of computer off a lorry into the
computer room.

Once the computer was in place then it was treated very much like the
directorial suite. It had its own retinue of staff who were somehow a
different breed of people to the rest of the organization, and its own set
of security procedures not only to prevent access but to deter enquiries.

The computer users—the accountants and engineers—would approach
the building clutching a pile of punched cards or papertape and hand it
over to an operator who would take them to the inner sanctum to be fed
into the machine to be processed. Some hours later the results of this
labour would by placed into a pigeonhole to be collected by the user.

In the early seventies Time Sharing started to become common. We
now know this as accessing the computer via a terminal, though in
those days it was more typically a mechanical teletype running at 50 or
110 baud, and even quite large installations would only be able to run
half a dozen of them. Nevertheless this sent a shiver of excitement
throughout the user community. It was possible for a department to
have its own interface to this vast resource, and this confirmed a great
degree of status. For the first time people felt computing power to be in
their grasp and, although perhaps not driven by need, people wanted
access and fought to get it.

By the mid-to-late seventies minicomputers were available and
computing power started to become decentralized. The actual use of
these machines, certainly at the start, was far less significant than their
potential effect. For the best part of ten years there were bloody
boardroom battles with Data Processing Managers (DPMs) fighting to
save their traditional status and power, and everyone else was striving
to make use of the machines and facilities that were becoming available.
This is not to say that the DPMs were driven by anything other
thanreasonable motives. A company with departmental minis and no

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