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 In telecommunications, packet switching is a method of grouping Data (computing), data into ''network packet, packets'' that are transmitted over a digital Telecommunications network, network. Packets are made of a header (computing), header and ...

and associated

communication protocol A communication protocol is a system of rules that allows two or more entities of a communications system to transmit information via any kind of variation of a physical quantity. The protocol defines the rules, syntax, semantics and synchroniza ...

s at the NPL in the late 1960s. He proposed the use of the technology in the

ARPANET The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the technical foun ...

, the forerunner of the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a ''internetworking, network of networks'' that consists ...

, at the inaugural Symposium on Operating Systems Principles in 1967. During the 1970s, he was an active member of international working groups that developed concepts for the interconnection of computer networks.

Early life

Roger Scantlebury was born in

Ealing Ealing () is a district in West London, England, west of Charing Cross in the London Borough of Ealing. Ealing is the administrative centre of the borough and is identified as a major metropolitan centre in the London Plan. Ealing was hi ...

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 The National Research Development Corporation (NRDC) was a non-departmental government body established by the British Government to transfer technology from the public sector to the private sector. History The NRDC was established by Attlee's Lab ...

(NRDC). His early work was on the Automatic Computing Engine and English Electric DEUCE computers. Following this he worked with

Donald Davies Donald Watts Davies, (7 June 1924 – 28 May 2000) was a Welsh computer scientist who was employed at the UK National Physical Laboratory (NPL). In 1965 he conceived of packet switching, which is today the dominant basis for data communic ...

on his pioneering

concepts. Scantlebury is one of the first people to describe the term '' protocol'' in a data-communications context in an April 1967 memorandum entitled "''A Protocol for Use in the NPL Data Communications Network"'' written with Keith Bartlett. 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. Also attending the conference was Larry Roberts, from the ARPA; this was the first time that Larry Roberts had heard of packet switching. Scantlebury persuaded Roberts and other American engineers to incorporate the concept into the design for the

. Subsequently he worked on development of the NPL Data Communications Network. He was seconded to the

Post Office Telecommunications Post Office Telecommunications was set up as a separate department of the UK General Post Office, Post Office, in October 1969. The Post Office Act 1969 was passed to provide for greater efficiency in post and telephone services; rather than run ...

in 1969, participating in a data communications study and supervising four data communications-related research contracts. This research team developed the alternating bit protocol (ABP). Along with Donald Davies and Derek Barber he participated in the International Networking Working Group (INWG) from 1972, initially chaired by

Vint Cerf Vinton Gray Cerf (; born June 23, 1943) is an American Internet pioneer and is recognized as one of " the fathers of the Internet", sharing this title with TCP/IP co-developer Bob Kahn. He has received honorary degrees and awards that includ ...

. He was acknowledged by Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf in their seminal 1974 paper on

internetworking Internetworking is the practice of interconnecting multiple computer networks, such that any pair of hosts in the connected networks can exchange messages irrespective of their hardware-level networking technology. The resulting system of interc ...

, ''"A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication",'' and he co-authored the standard agreed by the INWG in 1975, "''Proposal for an international end to end protocol''". 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 In telecommunications, packet switching is a method of grouping data into '' packets'' that are transmitted over a digital network. Packets are made of a header and a payload. Data in the header is used by networking hardware to direct the pac ...

, a

datagram A datagram is a basic transfer unit associated with a packet-switched network. Datagrams are typically structured in header and payload sections. Datagrams provide a connectionless communication service across a packet-switched network. The del ...

network linking CERN, the French research centre INRIA and the UK’s National Physical Laboratory.

Logica

He joined Logica in 1977 in their Communications Division,Communications Standards: State of the Art Report 14:3
/ref> where he worked on the CCITT (

ITU-T The ITU Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) is one of the three sectors (divisions or units) of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). It is responsible for coordinating standards for telecommunications and Information Commu ...

) X.25 protocol and with the formation of the Euronet, a

virtual circuit A virtual circuit (VC) is a means of transporting data over a data network, based on packet switching and in which a connection is established within the network between two endpoints. The network, rather than having a fixed data rate reservation ...

network using X.25. He moved to the Finance Division in 1981.

Personal life

He married Christine Appleby in 1958 in Middlesex; they had two sons in 1961 and 1966, and a daughter in 1963. He lives in

Esher Esher ( ) is a town in Surrey, England, to the east of the River Mole, Surrey, River Mole. Esher is an outlying suburb of London near the London-Surrey Border, and with Esher Commons at its southern end, the town marks one limit of the Greate ...

. Scantlebury was influential in persuading NPL to sponsor a gallery about "Technology of the Internet" at

The National Museum of Computing The National Museum of Computing is a museum in the United Kingdom dedicated to collecting and restoring historic computer systems. The museum is based in rented premises at Bletchley Park in Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire and opened in 2007 ...

, which opened in 2009.

Publications

* * * *

References

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 The Computer History Museum (CHM) is a museum of computer history, located in Mountain View, California. The museum presents stories and artifacts of Silicon Valley and the information age, and explores the computing revolution and its impact ...

, 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 {{DEFAULTSORT:Scantlebury, Roger 1936 births Living people British computer scientists History of computing in the United Kingdom Internet pioneers Packets (information technology) People from Brentford People from Esher Scientists of the National Physical Laboratory (United Kingdom)