Louis Pouzin | |
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 Louis Pouzin en 2013. | |
| Born | 20 April 1931  |
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Louis Pouzin (born 20 April 1931) is a Frenchcomputer scientist andInternet pioneer. He directed the development of theCYCLADES computer network in France the early 1970s, which implemented a novel design forpacket communication. He was the first to implement theend-to-end principle in a wide-area network, which became fundamental to the design of theInternet.
This network was the first implementation of the puredatagram model, initially conceived and described byDonald Davies, subsequently named byHalvor Bothner-By, and seen by Louis Pouzin as his personal invention. His work, and that of his colleaguesHubert Zimmerman andGérard Le Lann, were acknowledged byVinton Cerf as substantial contributions to the design ofTCP/IP, the protocol suite used by theInternet.
Louis Pouzin was born inChantenay-Saint-Imbert,Nièvre, France on 20 April 1931. He studied at theÉcole Polytechnique from 1950 to 1952.
Having participated in the design of theCompatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS) atMIT, Pouzin wrote a program for it calledRUNCOM around 1963–64. RUNCOM permitted the execution of commands contained within a folder and can be considered the ancestor of the command-line interface andshell scripts. Pouzin was the one who coined the termshell for a command language interpreter separate from thekernel in 1964 or 1965.[1] Pouzin's concepts were later implemented inMultics byGlenda Schroeder at MIT.[2] Schroeder developed the first Multics shell with the assistance of an unnamed man fromGeneral Electric. Schroeder's Multics shell was the predecessor to theUnix shell, which is still in use today.
Working with Glenda Schroeder and Pat Crisman, he also described an earlye-mail system called "MAIL" to allow users on the CTSS to send notifications to others about backups of files.[3][4] Each user's messages would be added to a local file called "MAIL BOX", which would have a “private” mode so that only the owner could read or delete messages.[5] The proposed uses of the proto-email system were for communication from CTSS to notify users that files had been backed up, discussion between authors of CTSS commands, and communication from command authors to the CTSS manual editor.[5] The service only made it possible to leave messages for the other users on the same computer. The idea to allow users to send messages between computers was developed later byRay Tomlinson in 1971.[6]
From 1967 to 1969 Pouzin developed one operating system forMétéo-France, the French national meteorological service, usingCDC 6400 as hardware. This system was created for weather forecast and statistics and was used for 15 years.[7]
Pouzin directed the pioneeringCYCLADES networking project from 1971 to 1976 atIRIA.[8] Building onDonald Davies’s simulation ofdatagram networks and the AmericanARPANET, Pouzin built the CIGALE packet switching network to researchinternetworking concepts.[9] CYCLADES used a layered protocol architecture, as did the Internet later.[10][11][12]
He co-founded theInternational Network Working Group at a computer networking conference he organised in Paris in June 1972 and was instrumental in developing the groups' ideas.[13][14][15][16] He was acknowledged byBob Kahn andVint Cerf in their seminal 1974 paper on internetworking protocols,A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication.[17]
In 2002 Pouzin, along with Jean-Louis Grangé, Jean-Pierre Henninot and Jean-François Morfin, participated in the creation ofEurolinc, which is a non-profit association that promotes multilingualism indomain names. In June 2003, Eurolinc was accredited byUNO to participate at theWorld Summit on the Information Society (WSIS).[18]
In November 2011, he founded Savoir-Faire, an alternative root company, with Chantal Lebrument and Quentin Perrigueur.[19][20]
In 2012 he developed a service called Open-Root, which is dedicated to selltop-level domains (TLD) in all scripts outside ofICANN. This way people can developsecond-level domains for free.[21]
Mr Pouzin created a program called RUNCOM that helped users automate tedious and repetitive commands. That program, which he described as a "shell" around the computer's whirring innards, gave inspiration—and a name—to an entire class of software tools, called command-line shells, that still lurk below the surface of modern operating systems.
The authors wish to thank a number of colleagues for helpful comments during early discussions of international network protocols, especially R. Metcalfe, R. Scantlebury, D. Walden, and H. Zimmerman; D. Davies and L. Pouzin who constructively commented on the fragmentation and accounting issues; and S. Crocker who commented on the creation and destruction of associations.
In the early 1970s Mr Pouzin created an innovative data network that linked locations in France, Italy and Britain. Its simplicity and efficiency pointed the way to a network that could connect not just dozens of machines, but millions of them. It captured the imagination of Dr Cerf and Dr Kahn, who included aspects of its design in the protocols that now power the internet.
