About

About Us

Team name: Three Lyricists
CHC61 Competition: Team a1221l

We are a team of three undergraduate students presenting this website as an entry for CHC61 The IEEE Computer Society Web Programming Competition organized by The IEEE Computer Society. We have choosen to portray Donald Watt Davies as UNSUNG HERO using this website.

Acknowledgements

We thank our mentor for his valuable advice throughout the project.

We acknowledge the help of NPL (esp. Joe Bennett - NPL Helpline) for sending us books which helped us gather most of the information presented in this website. We also appreciate NPL's help for granting us the permission to use the photographs from their archives.

NPL Package: Complements from NPL, NPL package contents(books, magzines, etc), NPL package

We are also grateful to Prof. Chris Edmondson Yurkanan for allowing us to use his copy of orginal proposals(written by Donald W. Davies) which was sent by Davies himself.

Our Objective

Today's internet is totally based on Davies' idea of Packet Switching. Without it, internet wouldn't have even existed. Not only this, but he also played an important role in the development of the Pilot ACE computer in London. Later, he also contributed in the Security system of networks, discovering new methods of public key cryptographic systems.

Davies was a kind of person who believed in service not in fame. He was always enthusiastic and busy in trying out new things that would benefit the digital world. He even forecasted in his time, what the future communication and networks would be like. But still he remains under the shadows, unnoticed.

Donald Davies was a man of honour. We believe that his name deserves to be among the top major contributors to the digital world. This site is a tribute to Donald Davies. It is our effort to let people know about Davies, whose ideas and contributions has led to the development of internet, which is an indispensible part of our life.

From Idea to Real Website

The email announcing our team's successful entry in the competetion was received on Apr 19, 2007. However, we did not start our work right then due to the exams (internal assessments, practical exams, viva). We started to search the internet to find the person who fits the theme "UNSUNG HERO" in the field of computing.

Flowchart to indicate how we achived our goal

Flowchart that depicts the strategy we followed to build this website.

Decide the person to portray as "UNSUNG HERO" - May 24, 2007

We started to search the internet to find the person who fits the theme "UNSUNG HERO" in the field of computing.We came across the article "Your heroes" published at Computer Weekly. We choose three candidates from this articles

Donald W Davies
Tommy Flowers
Clive Sinclair

and assigned ourselves each one of these candidates to perform a "perliminary research" on their background. We created a googlecode project to manage our project. After discussing with our mentor, we decided to portray Donald W Davies as UNSUNG HERO in our entry of CHC61 competetion.
We were sure that we had found the right person when our mentor said, "... I have been teaching about 'packet switching' from long time but I have never heard about Davies."

Collect all possible information about the UNSUNG HERO - May 28, 2007

We started to collect information related to Donald Davies with this note in front of us:
"When collection information on Donald Davies, do not blindly trust the contents posted on websites. Make sure that the content being taken is from a reputed source. Repetition of a fact in more than one independent website can be trusted to some extent. Keep track of all the information and their respective sources (website links, books, interviews, etc). We need to show the sources of our information on our final website.".
This task to be completed in this phase did not finish until the deadline of submitting the website. We were updating the contents till the last minute. We came across some interesting website, papers, articles every other day during the whole project time.

Research on "Pilot ACE", "Security", "Packet Switching" - First week of June 2007

This phase did not deal with collecting the usual stuffs written by other about Davies. We focused to find out things that were not noticed by others until now. We were successful to some extent (after we analyzed Davies' papers) and the analysis have been presented in various sections of this website.

Create sample designs for the website - June 10, 2007

We decided to develop our website design on theme "Book" (the website would give users a feel of reading a very old book in which they read about a great UNSUNG HERO). We came up with these two designs. After discussing with our mentor, we decided to continue with the second design (Design 2) which the design you are viewing this website in.

Sample designs. (left) Design 1: Artist's Pencil Design, Design 2: Old Book Design

The package sent by NPL arrived on June 13, 2007 at 6:15 PM. It contained two books and three posters published by the NPL.

Integrate the contents into the web design - June 25, 2007: Integrating the contents into the design was a breeze as the final version of the content was already prepared.
Testing (W3C Validation, browser compatibity testing, ...) - First week of July: We performed most the testing in Firefox 2.0 browser and Firebug saved us from lots of hassel. We had some issues related to web design compatibility with Internet Explorer (IE). Getting the website to display properly in IE was the most difficult part of the testing phase.
Publish the website and get feedback - July 07, 2007: We are ready to launch the website. We have sent email to our friends to check the website and comment on every aspect of the website.