How Did ‘Packet’ Get Into Computing?
Donald Davies helped establish packet in computer networking in the 1960s. He recalled choosing the word after consulting Steve Whelan, a linguist on their machine translation project, “at least partly because of its ease of translation.” But the term appears in computing earlier. At the National Physical Laboratory (NPL), Davies worked alongside Alan Turing. Turing used packet to describe a discrete data structure in Computing Machinery and Intelligence (Mind 59/236, 1950): ...