Packetswitching got its name thanks to late British scientist Donald Davies who was creating a network that used this technique at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL).
Birck takes some comfort from the fact that the bulk of Tellabs' flagship Titan 5500s manage local traffic, where the new world of packetswitching is not yet a big threat.
Packet-switching works for a variety of engineering reasons, not because it somehow embodies in code the distilled wisdom of Aristotle, Rousseau, Locke, and Madison.
Rather, the collective ingenuity of people such as Andy Bechtolsheim (co-founder of Sun Microsystems and subsequently Granite Systems) and Judy Estrin (a serial entrepreneur in the packet-switching business) was crucial to drive the technology through the standards bodies.