Subject areaChannels and tools
Also known asCyclades network
Cyclades is the research network built in France in the early 1970s by a team led by engineer Louis Pouzin.
Its core idea was the datagram: data travels split into independent packets, each carrying its own address, and the network only has to deliver them, while checking that they all arrived and in order is left to the computers at either end. The result is a simple and robust network, because losing a node does not stop communication.
The American designers of TCP/IP (the protocols, the shared rules computers on the internet use to talk to each other) took up that approach, so alongside ARPANET Europe also played a key role in the birth of the internet. The French network was shut down at the end of the 1970s, when public funding went to other projects.
An example
When an email leaves a chemical company in Milan for a customer in Lyon, its packets travel along different routes and are reassembled only on arrival: this is the datagram principle that Cyclades put to the test.
Enrico Giubertoni. Licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0: you may quote, translate and adapt this entry with the author’s name and a link, stating any changes. For commercial use, write to info@enricogiubertoni.com
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