"1965 - Donald Davies invents "packet switching," which is a new concept for computer communications. Packet switching involves breaking down a message or information into small pieces and sending them to a new location over communications lines. The technology will play an integral part in the premise of the Internet." - Computer's History

"Donald Davies' work on packet-switched data communication, heavily influenced the development of the Internet." - National Physical Labratory

"D W Davies is one of the most brilliant young men I have ever met, one of the very small number of persons who could draw up a complete logical design of an electronic computer, realise this design in actual circuitry, assemble it himself a high probability that it would work as designed? and then programme it and use it for solution of computational problems."
- recommending D W Davies for a Commonwealth Fund Fellowship in 1954, wrote his senior officer at The UK's National Measurement Laboratory

"What Arpanet did in 1969 that was important was to develop a variation of a technique called packet switching. In 1965, before Arpanet came into existence, an Englishman called Donald Davies had proposed a similar facility to Arpanet in the United Kingdom, the NPL Data Communications Network. It never got funded; but Donald Davies did develop the concept of packet switching, a means by which messages can travel from point to point across a network. Although others in the USA were working on packet switching techniques at the same time (notably Leonard Kleinrock and Paul Baran), it was the UK version that Arpanet first adopted." - Ian Peter , History of the Internet

"We are almost always told that the Internet began solely in America. This is not really true. The earliest pioneers included a Frenchman, Louis Pouzin, who introduced the idea of data grams and an Englishman, Donald W. Davies, who was one of the inventors of packet-switching. Another of the great pioneers in Britain was Peter T. Kirstein, who went to America at the beginning of the Arpanet in 1969 when it was decided that Davies could not go for reasons of national security." - Kim Veltman