Roger Anthony Scantlebury (born August 1936) is a British

computer scientist A computer scientist is a scientist who specializes in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation. Although computer scientists can also focus their work and research on ...

and Internet pioneer who worked at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) and later at

Logica Logica plc was a Multinational corporation, multinational information technology, IT and Management consulting, management consultancy company headquartered in London and later Reading, Berkshire, Reading, United Kingdom. Founded in 1969, the c ...

. Scantlebury led the pioneering work to implement

packet switching In telecommunications, packet switching is a method of grouping Data (computing), data into short messages in fixed format, i.e. ''network packet, packets,'' that are transmitted over a digital Telecommunications network, network. Packets consi ...

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 variation of a physical quantity. The protocol defines the rules, syntax, semantics (computer science), sem ...

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 computer networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the tec ...

, the forerunner of the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the Global network, 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 ...

, at the inaugural

Symposium on Operating Systems Principles In Ancient Greece, the symposium (, ''sympósion'', from συμπίνειν, ''sympínein'', 'to drink together') was the part of a banquet that took place after the meal, when drinking for pleasure was accompanied by music, dancing, recitals, o ...

in 1967. During the 1970s, he was a major figure in the

International Network Working Group The International Network Working Group (INWG) was a group of prominent computer science researchers in the 1970s who studied and developed Standardization, standards and communication protocol, protocols for interconnection of computer networks. Se ...

through which he was an early contributor to concepts used in the Transmission Control Program which became part of the

Internet protocol suite The Internet protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, is a framework for organizing the communication protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks according to functional criteria. The foundational protocols in the suite are ...

Early life

Roger Scantlebury was born in

Ealing Ealing () is a district in west London (sub-region), west London, England, west of Charing Cross in the London Borough of Ealing. It is the administrative centre of the borough and is identified as a major metropolitan centre in the London Pl ...

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 The Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) was a British early Electronic storage, electronic Serial computer, serial stored-program computer design by Alan Turing. Turing completed the ambitious design in late 1945, having had experience in the yea ...

and English Electric DEUCE computers. Following this he was tasked by Derek Barber to lead the implementation of

Donald Davies Donald Watts Davies, (7 June 1924 – 28 May 2000) was a Welsh computer scientist and Internet pioneer who was employed at the UK National Physical Laboratory (NPL). During 1965-67 he invented modern data communications, including packet s ...

' pioneering

concepts for

data communication Data communication, including data transmission and data reception, is the transfer of data, transmitted and received over a point-to-point or point-to-multipoint communication channel. Examples of such channels are copper wires, optic ...

. Scantlebury and Keith Bartlett were the first 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''. In October 1967, he attended the

in the United States, where he gave an exposition of packet-switching, developed at NPL (and referenced the work of Paul Baran). 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 led the development of the NPL Data Communications Network, publishing several research papers pioneering the development of packet-switched computer networks. Elements of the network became operational in early 1969, the first implementation of packet switching, and the NPL network was the first to use high-speed links. He was seconded to the Post Office Telecommunications 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 Davies and Barber, he was a major figure in the

(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 Robert Kahn. He has received honorary degrees and awards that inclu ...

. He attended the INWG meeting in New York in June 1973 that shaped the early direction of international network protocols, and was acknowledged by Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf in their seminal 1974 paper on

internetworking Internetworking is the practice of interconnecting multiple computer networks. Typically, this enables any pair of hosts in the connected networks to exchange messages irrespective of their hardware-level networking technology. The resulting sys ...

, ''A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication.'' He co-authored the standard agreed by INWG in 1975, ''Proposal for an international end to end protocol''. Scantlebury later reported directly to Davies at the NPL. 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 short messages in fixed format, i.e. '' packets,'' that are transmitted over a digital network. Packets consist of a header and a payload. Data in the header is used b ...

, 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 de ...

network linking

CERN The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN (; ; ), is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, it is based in Meyrin, western suburb of Gene ...

, the French research centre

INRIA The National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology (Inria) () is a French national research institution focusing on computer science and applied mathematics. It was created under the name French Institute for Research in Comp ...

and the UK’s National Physical Laboratory.

Later career

Scantlebury joined

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 International Telecommunication Union Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) is one of the three Sectors (branches) of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). It is responsible for coordinating Standardization, standards fo ...

)

X.25 X.25 is an ITU-T standard protocol suite for Packet switched network, packet-switched data communication in wide area network, wide area networks (WAN). It was originally defined by the CCITT, International Telegraph and Telephone Consultative Co ...

protocol and with the formation of the Euronet, a pan-European

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 first established across the network between two endpoints. The network, rather than having a fixed data rate reser ...

network using X.25. He moved to the Finance Division in 1981. In the 2000s, he worked for Mercator Software, Integra SP and as a consultant. Subsequently, he worked for Kofax (now Tungsten Automation) and retired in 2020.

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 Esher ( ) is a town in the borough of Borough of Elmbridge, Elmbridge in Surrey, England, to the east of the River Mole, Surrey, River Mole. Esher is an outlying suburb of London, close to the London–Surrey border; with Esher Commons at its ...

. 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.

Publications

* * 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. * * *

References

External links

''Internet Dreamers''
BBC interview with Vint Cerf, Bob Taylor, Larry Roberts and Roger Scantlebury, 2000

Comments by David Rayner, Derek Barber, Roger Scantlebury, and Peter Wilkinson at the Symposium of the Institution of Analysts & Programmers, 2001
''The Internet - Where it came from & where it is going''
IET/BCS evening talk at the University of Cambridge, 2007
''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 {{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)