A Celebration of David Wheeler

In this presentation, the speaker discusses David Wheeler's involvement in the development of the Cambridge Ring, an experimental local area network architecture developed at Cambridge University's Computer Laboratory in the mid-to-late 1970s and early 1980s. It used a ring topology around which cycled a fixed number of packets. Free packets would be "loaded" with data by a machine wishing to send, marked as received by the destination machine, and "unloaded" on return to the sender; thus in principle there could be as many simultaneous senders as packets. The network ran over twin twisted-pair cabling (plus a fibre-optic section).