Louis Pouzin

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Louis Pouzin, (1931 - ) born in Chantenay-Saint-Imbert (Nièvre), France, invented the datagram and designed the first packet communications network, CYCLADES. He also created the first forms of command-line interface.

His work was broadly used by Vinton Cerf in his development of Internet and TCP/IP.

Having participated in the design of CTSS, Pouzin wrote a program called RUNCOM around 1963/64. RUNCOM permitted the execution of contained commands within a folder, and can be considered the ancestor of the command-line interface and shell scripts. Pouzin was, in fact, the one who introduced the term shell for the command language used in Multics and defined the principles Glenda Schroeder at MIT used.

Louis Pouzin was given the French order "Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur" (Knight of the Legion of Honour) on March 19, 2003.

[edit] External links

• Louis Pouzin, The Origin of the Shell
• A small biography of Louis Pouzin
• A nice photo of Louis Pouzin taken by French photographer Olivier Roller