Roger Scantlebury

Scantlebury was influential in persuading NPL to sponsor a gallery about "Technology of the Internet" at The National Museum of Computing, which opened in 2009.

He joined Logica in 1977 in their Communications Division, where he worked on the CCITT (ITU-T) X.25 protocol and with the formation of the Euronet, a virtual circuit network using X.25. He moved to the Finance Division in 1981.

Along with Donald Davies and Derek Barber he participated in the International Networking Working Group (INWG) from 1972, initially chaired by Vint Cerf. He was acknowledged by Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf in their seminal 1974 paper on internetworking, "A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication", and he co-authored the standard agreed by the INWG in 1975, "Proposal for an international end to end protocol".

Subsequently he worked on development of the NPL Data Communications Network. He was seconded to the Post Office Telecommunications in 1969, participating in a data communications study and supervising four data communications-related research contracts. This research team developed the alternating bit protocol (ABP).

Following this he worked with Donald Davies on his pioneering packet switching concepts. Scantlebury is one of the first people to describe the term protocol in a data-communications context in an April 1967 memorandum entitled "A Protocol for Use in the NPL Data Communications Network" written with Keith Bartlett. In October 1967, he attended the Symposium on Operating Systems Principles in the United States, where he gave an exposition of packet-switching, developed at NPL. Also attending the conference was Larry Roberts, from the ARPA; this was the first time that Larry Roberts had heard of packet switching. Scantlebury persuaded Roberts and other American engineers to incorporate the concept into the design for the ARPANET.

Scantlebury participated in pioneering work to develop packet switching and associated communication protocols at the NPL in the late 1960s. He proposed the use of the technology in the ARPANET, the forerunner of the Internet, at the inaugural Symposium on Operating Systems Principles in 1967. During the 1970s, he was an active member of international working groups that developed concepts for the interconnection of computer networks.

He married Christine Appleby in 1958 in Middlesex; they had two sons in 1961 and 1966, and a daughter in 1963. He lives in Esher.

Roger Anthony Scantlebury (born August 1936) is a British computer scientist who worked at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) and later at Logica.