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Page last updated at 23:59 GMT, Thursday, 4 February 2010

'Packet switching' system's first computer network

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Roger Scantlebury demonstrates the "packet switching" system that underpins how data moves around the internet.

He was a member of the National Physical Laboratory team that ran a computer network at multimegabit speeds in the late 1960s.

Mr Scantlebury presented the ideas about "packet switching" to the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Symposium on Operating System Principles in the US and they were picked up by the creators of the nascent Arpanet.

The system enables more than one computer to share data across a network and underpins the way that the modern internet operates.

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