Technological growth - Packet switching

The first concept of sending small blocks of data was originally explored by Paul Baran in the early 1960s. The idea of sending information in packets was coincidentally also developed in the UK a few years later by Donald Davies and the National Physical Laboratory.

Packet switching is where a piece of information is split up into multiple packets. Each of these smaller packets is assigned a ‘header’.  The header contains a network IP address, which it needs to arrive to and it also has the details of the IP address from which it was sent so that if anything goes wrong it can be returned safely. The header also gives each packet a number and records how many packets the data was split up into, this allows for the maximum security which it can do.

This has contributed to the growth of the internet because it has allowed for a much securer connection  for sending you personal details over the internet and has also widened what we use the internet for.